Forum cleanup

We had a discussion on IRC about the forum, the documentation and comments.

I just picked a random example. If you have a look at it, many of it is very outdated and even wrong. So what I would like todo is to get the forum cleaned up a bit and for that I do not simply want to decide what to delete and what not.

At the moment if someone complains about the documentation I use to suggest the following: Post a comment with your desired updates to the node. If it gets accepted someone with appropriate permissions will add it to the node and delete the comment.

I would like to have that as a kind of rule.

Additionally I'd propose a simple procedure to delete old content:
Do a reply to the top-most comment you want to delete (and of course all subcomments). Wait one week for at least one other "ok" comment, then delete the comments including the delete-request. If there's a complaint/veto to deleting it, wait a week and delete the delete-request Smiling

For forum posts I'd propose basically the same as for comments, just that we move the entire forum post to a archive section (that we'd still have to create..).

I think this would give us an easy transparent way of managing our content, especially deleting old, outdated content. What do you think?

Like the idea, but the details...

I talked about this in IRC; the idea is to archive so the content is not deleted, but it is removed from normal searching. I don't know enough about the site to know how/if this can be done. Maybe flag a post as archived, and have a "search archives" flag in the search options? Moving posts doesn't seem the right way to handle it to me, but again I don't know enough of the details.

I agree the forums shouldn't be deleted, but should be moderated (spam, etc), and the documentation should be updated as much as possible to keep it current. Too bad there is not a wiki type system to record recent changes for review.

Forums and Book pages are different

Book pages represent our documentation and should be ruthlessly ( Smiling ) edited to keep them accurate and up-to-date. Material in comments on book pages should be incorporated into pages at the page editors' discretion, and then hidden or deleted.

On the other hand, forums pages represent discussions between people and represent their views. As a general rule [*], I think that we should not correct or delete them, no matter how wrong they are. It might be worth labeling statements about JNode that are patently incorrect, but I'm not convinced that is the right thing to do.

[* There are exceptions of course; e.g. link spam and offensive postings need to be dealt with appropriately.]

As an alternative way to down-play misleading forum postings, perhaps we should configure the site search to exclude them from the default search results. Or maybe we could change the search result ranking to rank Book pages ahead of Forum pages, etc.

But this is just my opinion. I'm happy to go with the majority view.

You're right

You're right about what you said. But it didn't answer my question.

Of course I do not want to delete book pages. Many of them have useless or old information and I do not want to delete it without review, that's why I made the suggestion.

Regarding the forum pages my suggestion was to move them to an "archive" folder. And I agree we should not correct or delete them.

I'm just searching for a clean way to handle that. Especially that non-moderators can also help cleanup and extend the forum/documentation.

To answer your question

Now that I understand that your "flag, wait a week, delete" protocol applies to Book content, yes I agree that it is a good idea, and am happy to try it out.

I'm not convinced of the value of moving old forum topics to 'archive'. When I'm looking for information, I tend to use search rather than browsing the forums / issues. Hence my counter-suggestion about changing the search ranking. But if you think that 'archiving' will help to down-play outdated content, I've no objection to giving it a try.