Posting Message Idea

mstormi · February 17, 2020, 8:45am

Nope. Sigh
I wrote:

If you tell me how to access Category settings I can do, but I have not found that option.
Admin can, moderators likely cannot.

Bruce_Osborne · February 17, 2020, 10:43am

Fair enough.
Who is the Admin here?

BrutalBirdie · February 17, 2020, 10:47am

@Bruce_Osborne

https://community.openhab.org/about

Bruce_Osborne · February 17, 2020, 10:49am

Thank you.

Kai · February 17, 2020, 10:36pm

I am. What shall I do?

BrutalBirdie · February 17, 2020, 10:41pm

Good morning @Kai

TL;DR
The idea here was to auto-close topics after 6 Weeks, was proposed, of inactivity since the thread hijacking is getting out of hand.

Kai · February 17, 2020, 11:00pm

Ok, I have set auto-closure after last post to 1000 hours for all categories.
Let’s see if that leads to a crashing forum, because it will have to close 95% of our topics tonight ;-).

Bruce_Osborne · February 17, 2020, 11:01pm

Thanks. You realize you could have spread out the initial load, right?
Are you going to warn DigitalDan or just let it crash?

Kai · February 17, 2020, 11:11pm

I doubt that there will be any issue!

Bruce_Osborne · February 17, 2020, 11:23pm

Thank you again.

Bruce_Osborne · February 18, 2020, 4:28pm

The change looks like it is only for new threads. That is a start
Is there any way to have somebody review and lock the ancient threads? Perhaps some automated script or semi-automated reporting?

Bruce_Osborne · February 25, 2020, 1:39am

Somebody just commented over a 2 year old thread!

Any other ideas @kai?

BrutalBirdie · February 25, 2020, 7:39am

Hey @Bruce_Osborne maybe you didn’t notice but the “auto close after x time” is active.
It does not close old topics since it’s one month+- from the activation of the feature to be auto-closed.

And I think it’s good like that, since people need to adjust.
The best we can do now is communicate.
Let me just quote @rpwong since I can agree with him very much.

rpwong:

I think it’s always going to be difficult for new users to decide whether or not they should start fresh or continue a post, because they lack the knowledge/experience to know if their issues are the same or different from what they’re reading. All they can do is interpret what others have written and take a guess. So you end up with some people jumping onto threads with different problems, and others starting new threads right next to other ongoing discussions about the exact same thing.

I’m not immune to this. I don’t have your technical skills, so I often can’t tell if the problem I’m trying to solve is directly related to a post I’m reading, and I sometimes can’t understand aspects of the discussion. If that’s the case, am I better off trying to explain everything in a fresh post, or tack onto an existing one so that the people I’m asking for help have context? I personally lean toward the latter approach.

I was also going to suggest closing old posts after they’ve been dormant for a period of time, but sometimes the value is engaging the people who were previously involved in the discussion and have a lot of context. With a new post, that doesn’t happen automatically. So, I’m not sure where the happy medium is.

In the end, I think the best thing we can do is be welcoming at every turn and understand that new users haven’t learned how to engage with this community. That enables us to coach them and help them gain confidence in being part of it. Otherwise, we run the risk of scaring people away because they worry more about being scolded and judged than being helped. The downside is that this requires a lot of patience, and patience wears thin when you feel like you’re saying the same thing over and over again.

As much as I want to protect new users, I also want to prevent dedicated folks like all of you from feeling like this is a burden. Your time and effort is valuable to this community, and hobbies should be fun.

I looked at the referenced topic, and it’s a completely new user.

Yes I can understand your frustration, but it would be best to enable the new user to behave in a desirable way.
That would be beneficial in my eyes.

Bruce_Osborne · February 25, 2020, 9:29am

It is working for threads created after the setting change. I believe the older inactive ones are still open like the one I posted from 2017.

BrutalBirdie · February 25, 2020, 10:22am

Hmmm seems like it. Just checked a post from 2015, no message about

There is a way how to do it in bulk, see:

cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
rails c
Topic.where(closed: false).where("created_at < '2015-01-01'").find_each do |topic| 
  topic.update_status("closed", true, Discourse.system_user)
end

But in my opinion this is would be to broad.
If there is a way to be more precise like

created_at < '2015-01-01' AND last_response < '2020-01-01'

The AND last_response < '2020-01-01 is completely fabricated by my mind, but this should be possible.

EDIT:

I just did some database exploration and tested the following in my own little discourse setup and can confirm this works.

cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
rails c
Topic.where(closed: false).where("created_at < '2019-01-01' AND updated_at < '2020-01-01'").find_each do |topic| 
  topic.update_status("closed", true, Discourse.system_user)
end

And yes my forum now looks a lot like this close and open since I wanted to revert these changes.

Thank god cloudron.io does auto backups every 12 hours and I can just revert the fuzz.

BUT! BIG BUT!

All topics (effected by the query) suddenly had a NEW notification since the “System” User closed/opened the Topic

This is like a HUGE BULK NECROBUMP.

If this option is being considered, I can provide my Discourse as a testing environment

Bruce_Osborne · February 25, 2020, 11:30am

Paging @kai to see if we can improve the situation further. If this were done in steps (1 year at a time?) that could reduce the server and email load.