Tool for Forum Cleanup?

[Gregory_Reyes]

Hey guys! I’m just wondering if there’s a tool / plug-in that can help me do a sort of “clean-up” for our forum? The idea is to clear out any unnecessary / outdated topics so that users don’t find themselves going back to it. I was also thinking maybe some themes that can give a cleaner look can help as well? Or any plug-in that can help reduce clutter in order to focus on quality discussions or support processes. Any help would be much appreciated!

[robmc (Robert McIntosh)]

Happy to try to help, but can you define what you mean by ‘clean-up’ in this case?

One of the strengths of a forum is that relevant content can be found over time and does not have to be recent - the problem, for example of social networks like twitter.

The content will be available for users to search and discover, so it is more helpful to do the work to link & merge related topics as they arise to create better reference content rather than ‘clean up’ afterwards, but it will depend on your community and what content is being created.

One thing you could consider is in Category Settings, you can set Auto-close topic hours to close automatically after a certain time, so new arrivals can read the material and reference it but not revive the topic. Have you tried this?

If you want to select which topics are “unnecessary / outdated” you can select them and close them all - there is more information on that here:

Mass close topics?

Is mass close topics available? If not, I would recommend to add this option.

[Gregory_Reyes]

Thanks for this! The issue is really more of old topics being revived so we’re trying to lessen this by maybe deleting old topics, hence the “cleanup”. But maybe cleanup is the wrong term. Our main objective is to organize the whole forum in terms of look and function so that support processes are better.

[robmc (Robert McIntosh)]

I trust the link answers some of those questions, and maybe adding the auto-close to the category will help to reduce the work going forward

If you have active mods, then you can also use Topic Timers to auto-close, or auto-delete, specific topics if they are unlikely to add to the reference material on the site

This thread is about creating new posts, but it will point you to the place to also select auto-delete if you want

How to create a Timed Topic

If you would like to create a topic that can be published at a later date this guide will show you how. You may also be looking for how to schedule a topic, how to delay a topic posting, or how to create a topic in the future. These are the basic steps, and then I’ll go through each step in detail: Create a new topic and publish it to a private category Click the admin “wrench” icon next to the first post of the topic Select “Set Topic Timer…” Choose the publish time and select the category y…

[WorldIsMine (DaveK)]

Reviving this as I had a similar question. In my community, virtually everyone deals with sensitive data via PMs. Lots of images, pdfs, documents, etc. The old PMs aren’t needed anymore and I would love the ability to purge old PMs en masse, in case we ever get breached it would get really messy.