How do “Archiving” vs. “Closing” a topic compare?
Common to both
- Displays a “lock” icon next to topic in lists
- Disables replying to topic
- Disables “Invite” button at bottom of topic.
- Closing or archiving a topic does not bump its last activity date.
- Continues to allow flagging of topic or posts.
- Continues to allow bookmarking.
Specific to Archived topics
- Disables users ability to delete a post.
- Disables likes.
- Disabled poll based voting (effectively closing polls).
- Disables display of topic on the
/top
page - Disables inclusion in digest emails.
- Disables display of topic in “random” topics list in footer of topic page.
- Continues to be displayed in the
Unread
list (i.e. you see the post marking it as Archived, this is by design).
Noteworthy
- Admins, Moderators and Trust Level 4 (TL4) users are not impacted by all these limitations and continue to be able to post in and edit posts in both archived and closed topics.
- Closing a topic previously also closed any open polls, this is no longer the case.
- Polls are now only closed by closing the poll itself or archiving the topic.
- You cannot now use the topic “auto-close” functionality to close the poll at a specific time and date.
Where do topics go when archived?
- You can see archived topics via the
status=archived
query string parameter: https://meta.discourse.org/?status=archived - You can still see archived topics when browsing to a specific category.
- You can use the
status:archived
filter to search specifically for archived topics.
Unlisted
When a topic is “Unlisted” this has the following impact:
- Prevents the inclusion of the topic for normal users in “lists”, this includes:
- Homepage / “latest” list.
- Unread topics list.
- Search results
- Disables inclusion in digest emails.
- Can only be accessed via a direct link of an unlisted topic.
- Is not Google-indexable (but if it has already been indexed it may remain available for weeks or even months depending on Google’s crawler)
A topic can be a combination of all three states “Closed”, “Archived” and “Unlisted”.