Over the years we have accumulated a lot of changes to Discourse that are not properly reflected in #howto:faq making it hard for people to reason and learn about Discourse features.
What is happening?
All the topics in #howto:faq will have all replies deleted after 30 days. This will be a rule from now onwards. If people want to discuss faqs they will be strongly encoraged to open dedicated topics, otherwise like tears in the rain, your clarifications may be lost.
This means we have 30 days to fold in all the knowledge in the replies back into the OP.
We can not set this rule till we do the initial cleanup… so we will set this by hand as we go with the cleanup.
All the topics in #howto:faq are marked as wiki. Meaning anyone can edit them and make them better.
Sam (me) is watching all these topics, so edits on faq will, at least, go to me.
We will introduce a silver badge for docs team (name to be determined ™) for people who edit N (N will be determined in 30 days) #howto:faq topics
We will introduce a gold, title worthy, badge for docs team members who have gone above and beyond improving stuff
In some rare cases there may be discussion that needs to be preserved, Discourse co-workers will work through the list to ensure nothing critical gets lost.
What you can do?
Search, for #faq order:views you can find a reasonable work list, that places top viewed topics on the top. It probably makes sense in that order.
If we have well established tags on #howto:faq topics that are missing them … add them.
Please don’t feel terrible your reply is being automatically deleted from #howto:faq topics, this is how it will work from now on. Discuss elsewhere.
I propose guidance on this point. I love to reply-as-linked-topic, but I’ve found others don’t grok it, so maybe a meta-howto on discussing howtos, or each howto could, as a convention, mention how it ought to be discussed. To give the noobs a fighting change.
This topic (The difference between admins and mods) requires a bit of automation to extract Moderator / Admin features. Maybe it does not have to be exhaustive, but it would be useful if someone from the team would point to the right place(s) to look at in the source code.
The topic might be reformulated as a question, e.g., “What is the difference between Leader, Moderator, and Admin?”.
Sam, a doubt about this cleanup … every time that a user open a new topic, do you have to set the auto-delete replies setting? Or there is a category setting to do that automatically ?
