What do you do when you have a single topic that becomes too long, but you cannot split it because the conversation is still relevant?
How do surface replies that are good but hidden in between other replies? Example, on our website we have a section where people can vote for features. Users keep on saying “I want this” followed by an occasional good comment. This good comment gets lost because there’s no way to upvote similar to Reddit.
If people use the like feature appropriately then the topic summary should do the trick here.
What Hawk said is correct, also, you may want to issue some rules for the category (I assume this is a category, like “possible new features”) so that each topic is a single feature request. Allowing people to kitchen sink infinite feature request replies into the same topic isn’t going to go well for anyone.
I was looking at a specific example in your forums Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) - Roadmap - Wyze Community and have some advice:
Don’t be afraid to prune out mess. If you treat every reply a special forever protected snowflake and never prune when 3 people post: +1 for the RTSP. in a row, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Don’t be afraid to split out great conversation. If you notice a great reply that deserves a dedicated topic, move it to a new topic. This encourages conversation in the right spot.
Don’t be afraid to edit the OP (first post) and provide a quick summary of where stuff is at and any big milestones potentially linking to other conversation.
Overall, a 94 post topic is not a huge drama, people can work through it… but once a feature request with voting has 100s of posts, something does not feel right.
Love those advice. I do it every day. The last one is great, especially for “tell us your experiences/tools” topics
Splitting out a new conversation permits others to notice it and chime in
Oh thanks very much!
I have always been wondering what posts were kept in that summary!
Prune? Do you mean extract all RTSP related posts and put them in a new split topic?
Well depends on the content … there are two types of people in the world … the “deletionist” and the “preservationist”.
The “preservationist” believes that all content be it “LOL +1” posts or “here is a random picture of an ant” MUST BE PRESERVED or disarray will be created in the universe.
The “deletionist” believes all content must have utility and add to the conversation, off topic / out of date stuff has high potential of being long term search mines so they should be deleted.
In reality as a moderator you are somewhere on this spectrum. If you are hard core “preservationist” odds are you will split. If you are hard core “deletionist” you will delete.
There’s a third option
This takes a fair bit of work versus the other two options though, which is why it is rarely pursued in the wild.
The problem of the “deletionist” is that people are always frustrated or angry when their posts are deleted, it is natural feeling.
And then you may get angry topics, repeated topics, people leaving slamming the door, etc.
More and more things to delete and more and more frustration.
I usually like to have multiple topics for the same subject.
A lot of the time, even if an old topic has useful information, it also tends to have a lot of outdated information which only serves to confuse people and when you’re in the world of software or administration, this can result in a lot of misunderstandings you’d rather not have.
That’s just my view on it though.
有时，如果你作为版主唯一的动机是“让每个人都开心”，最终结果可能是没有人感到开心。
优秀的版主必须定期做出艰难的决定，这些决定会让一些人感到不满，但却有利于他们管理的社区。
他们需要封禁用户，需要删除内容，需要合并和关闭话题，有时还需要介入并为讨论定下基调。
我认为这其实是一场过去已经大致发生过的讨论，恐怕不会有什么结果，任何一方也不会改变立场。但我想明确表态：我强烈反对。这种逻辑正是所有暴君、种族灭绝以及一切灾难的根源。好吧，也许我们只是在讨论删除几个 ASCII 字符，但我确实非常反感这种所谓“必须做出艰难决定”的信念——仿佛某些“伟大”人物会为了“更大的利益”而牺牲部分人的利益。相信他们吧，他们比受影响的人、比你、甚至可能比所有人都更清楚什么是对的。（也许情况确实如此，我并非要否认这一点。）
无意冒犯（我觉得有必要在此说明一下，希望能有所帮助）。当然，这是你的论坛，你制定规则并决定其运作方式。最终，人们可以离开，而且有人会觉得，如果他们当初选择加入，那便是他们自己的责任。
请原谅我，我可能是一个“保存主义者”，甚至可能过于极端了。但我想敦促每一位论坛所有者或管理员：无论你们如何管理论坛、内容和用户，都务必从一开始就将其非常清楚地阐明。言出必行。这样我想一切都会顺利。每个人都知道、都被提醒过，并能据此采取行动。（例如，关于帖子在 30 天后自动删除的规则，似乎已经明确公告。在此发帖，后果自负。对此我确实表示认可。）