It’s your forum so you’re the one who decides how it’s going to work, and if you want that plugin we’ll happily fork it, delete that single line that checks for no replies and install it for you. But I’m not sure if it’s a good choice to do it like that.
I’m still confused about the issue with the request…
Why is it a good choice to delete topics that have replies older than N, but a bad choice to delete them after N days? In the end, aren’t both plugins deleting topics…?
I think we are discussing the same thing, with just a small difference:
Your plugin relies on the age of a reply. The plugin I’m suggesting doesn’t.
So SEO or People learn from previous classifieds what works and what doesn’t won’t change on either plugin. They do exactly the same thing in the end: they delete topics. The only difference is when.
If you check a lot of topics in a forum, most of them don’t get replies for months or even years, even those that are more prone to discussion, which is not the case here, so it’s not relevant to keep a classifieds topic alive for so long.
Let me give you another example: you want to sell a chair. Do you want people replying to your topic 6 months from now, when probably you sold the chair 1 week after you created the topic? Probably not. So if the rule on a category is that every topic gets deleted 2 weeks after they are created and the user knows this before they create the topic, 2 things happen:
1 - They know that they don’t have to worry about deleting their topic, in case they sell the item in those 2 weeks and forget about the topic;
2 - If they don’t sell it in those 2 weeks, they just need to create a new topic.
As I mentioned before, the difference between this approach and the one on your plugin is that the user (or anyone else) could keep “bumping” the post with replies like this 🔥. So if the item is not sold for 6 months and the rule is to delete unreplied topics after 2 weeks, think of how many useless replies that topic would have to keep it alive, not to mention that it would keep showing the reply in the latest section, creating useless “noise”.
As I shared before, you can see that others here have the exact same workflow, so it’s not just my wish to have a plugin like this:
Actually, I don’t think that is a good choice either?
And Discourse does not have such functionality, nor am I aware of a plugin that does this. Discourse is able to delete replies after a certain amount of days (and TBH I think it’s one of its worst features, maybe only autobumping old topics is worse).
No, it doesn’t. It removes topics with no replies at all.
The obvious thing to do here is to have the topic auto close X days after the last reply / after creation or to manually close it after that chair has been sold. Keeping the topic gives people an idea of a) how to sell a chair b) what a chair is worth c) that a chair can be sold through the forum. A good example is the Marketplace category right here on meta.
This doesn’t make sense (at least to me) since the potential gain of #1 is less than the potential extra effort of #2.
Which can be prevented with settings like Max consecutive replies, Min post length and normal moderation.
Long story short, I would be reluctant to remove ANY topics (spam excluded), because the content is what defines your forum and its “culture”. It also breaks internal links, which can be frustrating to users.
This does make a lot of sense. Close the topic after sale. Maybe use the Solved plugin with a CSS tweak in that category to “Mark as Sold” or something and close topic after marked
Each forum is different, with different needs, different goals.
When the time comes, if you have that plugin available (or if you’re willing to remove that line and make it available), I will definitely want to install it.
Thanks