How to handle changing organizational roles, re. past mentions on the forum

Community Building
1

We have a situation where a long term volunteer is stepping down. Over several years in countless conversations they are mentioned as the person to talk to about X.

I realize now that we probably should have originally created a group for this role and always mentioned the group as who to contact.

My concern is that now this ex-volunteer will have to field messages regarding their old role. They may not mind telling people who they should actually contact now (perhaps a newly created group for the role) but if they go off line or stop participation in general, then these inquires will go unanswered.

It’s not a huge problem, but I’m wondering if three is a technical solution to the situation we are in now. The volunteer will continue to be part of the forum, just not in that role.

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2

A few things I thought of:

  1. Global (dismissable) banner at the top of the site asking users to message user xyz for queries instead of this volunteer
  2. Pinned topic for all users
  3. Perhaps a policy (Discourse Policy)? Then you need to check the ‘I understand’. Perhaps this paired with no. 2 above.
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3

You could do a remap but it’s going to be hard to differentiate between mentions for the “user in particular” and mentions for the “user who talk about X” :thinking:

Depending on how popular that user was, you could manually find all the posts with a mention to that user and edit them to use a mention to the group when they make sense.

Alternatively, you could rename mentions “as you go” (aka. whenever you or a staff member if you have any come across one of those mentions).

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