# How should category archiving work?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-should-category-archiving-work/32895
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [2015年九月4日 00:03 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-should-category-archiving-work/32895 "2015-09-04T00:03:40Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 6

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### Author: ![erlend\_sh](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/erlend_sh/32/119475_2.png) [@erlend\_sh](https://meta.discourse.org/u/erlend_sh)
#### Post date: [2015年九月4日 10:17 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-should-category-archiving-work/32895/6 "2015-09-04T10:17:25Z")

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If the **removal** of the content is the point, then a soft delete like you mention (assuming hard deletes are a problem) should be applied on all of the content, _and_ all of these topics & posts should be excluded from the default backup. Instead, when you do the archiving, they should be put in a separate “Archives” backup of their own.

If you just don’t want your searches getting polluted & slowed down with deprecated posts, and you don’t want archived categories cluttering up your category list, then a “do not search” flag on archived post and a special category that doesn’t show even in staff lists (but retrievable through admin panel somehow) would suffice. Essentially making all topics Unlisted, plus special treatment of the category visibility.

We’ve talked about similar things before:

> [@Should old topics be deleted from this forum?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/should-old-topics-be-deleted-from-this-forum/19070):
>
> This seems worthy of its own discussion topic for the community here to weigh in on in the ‘meta’ sense (continuing the discussion from [Notification when a moderator or admin deletes your message](https://meta.discourse.org/t/notification-when-a-moderator-or-admin-deletes-your-message/18875/36)): What kind of topics should be deleted from this forum? Should they be handled in some other way?

> [@Best practices for archiving topics](https://meta.discourse.org/t/best-practices-for-archiving-topics/27069/12):
>
> Is there a difference in search engine visibility for Archived topics? I for one would like to see archived topics be not-indexed by Google and co., and be invisible or deprioritized in the in-Discourse search. This for many of the reasons stated [here](https://meta.discourse.org/t/should-old-topics-be-deleted-from-this-forum/19070), but still leaving the topic around for people who have the link or otherwise know where it is…

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