To make searching the forums more efficient, we are considering deleting unanswered forum posts that are more than six months old.

A consequence of this project is that members whose posts are deleted would lose points, which would lower their contributor rankings.

We are asking the user community for feedback on this proposed project. Please vote below to make yourself heard. Reply to this post to begin a discussion of this cleanup.

I don't think losing points is really an issue here.  You're talking about deleting unanswered posts.  If someone's contributor ranking is "at risk" because of this cleanup, have they really been contributing?  Or have they just been posting stuff that isn't useful?

On some of the less-frequented forums, deleting old unanswered posts could reduce the usefulness of the forums.  For example, I might post something about a problem I'm having with Financial Edge, including my workarounds.  I might not get any answers because nobody on the forums is having exactly the same problem.  But months down the road, that post might prove useful.  Maybe someone new has joined a Blackbaud customer site.  Maybe another customer has changed one of their business processes and run into the same problem I had.  Maybe a new Blackbaud customer finds they have the same problem. 

I can think of two recent instances where old posts on Financial Edge forums proved useful again.

I also don't really understand how deleting old unanswered posts makes "searching the forums more efficient."  Could you explain that more?  What's the problem that's leading to this proposed solution?

It would be helpful if people from Blackbaud would consider trying to respond to the unanswered posts.

I don't think it's a matter of points.  I didn't know anyone was courting.  If people posted a questions and never received an answer they can repost their question in a different way that might prompt some responses.

Wow - it's great to see how much activity here already!

Paul - Great point!  Because deleting posts is a manual process, we will be able to preserve any post that shares a best practice or a client document and does not require a response.  Our intent is to delete posts that feature unanswered questions.

Cindy C.- Another great point!  We are going to be taking a more active role in answering unanswered posts.  That said, while we can help with how to or issue questions, a lot of these unanswered posts are requests for best practices from other nonprofits, foundations, schools, etc.

Keep the votes and comments coming!

I voted to keep them.  I would, however like to see a listing somewhere on the website of unanswered posts so we can see them together somewhere.  As much as I try to keep on top of postings I may not have seen all of them so periodically checking the unanswered posts list could be a "in my freetime" project.  LOL

Doug - Would it be possible for the consultants to help with the best practices?

My vote is to keep older history as this has been a helpful tool for me to find previous questions and how they were answered.

Sorting them as unanswered would be great.

Hey Melissa and Liesl, we do have a place where you can view all of the unanswered posts.

To find them, go to the main forums page. The Unanswered Posts portlet is on the right hand side - beneath Shortcuts, Popular Tags, My Discussions, Active, and above Most Active Users.

Click Unanswered to view all unanswered posts. You can filter the posts by forum and age. When you filter on a high level forum, like The Raiser's Edge, the filter only includes posts added to the root of that forum. To see unanswered posts in the subforums, filter on each one individually.

Recently, I've been highlighting unanswered forum posts on The User's Edge blog. Let me know if you have any ideas for how we can raise their visibility!

Cindy C.- thanks for the idea!

It's great to hear all of this from the user community - keep the votes and comments coming!

Another reason to not clean up unanswered posts is off-forum replies. I haven't seen any evidence of it on this forum but on another forum and an old listserv it happened a lot. I have either posted asking if the original poster received any off forum/off list responses or resolved the issue themselves. I wouldn't know if someone else had the issue if the post was gone.

laura

Laura Caswell:

Another reason to not clean up unanswered posts is off-forum replies. I haven't seen any evidence of it on this forum but on another forum and an old listserv it happened a lot. I have either posted asking if the original poster received any off forum/off list responses or resolved the issue themselves. I wouldn't know if someone else had the issue if the post was gone.

Laura,

I think that this, by far, is the best reason mentioned to keep them.  Thank you for posting.

Melissa

That's a good point, Laura.  I've noticed that sometimes people will ask for an email or a phone call when they have a question, and I've been curious what happens with those posts.  Has anyone contacted someone outside of the forums to help them with a best practice or an issue?

Doug,

Now that I know there is an unanswered posts section I will take a look at it more often.  However, the way it is set up makes it a huge task.  Can you segment it so that unanswered posts from each forum are in separate categories because I do not have FE or EE, etc and I can't see from the list which forum they are posting to and the tiele does not always make it evident.  It takes too long for me to open all of them (which would mean I'm not going to do it very often).  get my drift...  :)

Melissa

Hey Melissa - you can filter the unanswered posts by Forum and age using the dropdown menus at the top of the Unanswered Posts page. Check out the attached screenshot.

This is generally a bad idea, and there is no technical reason to do so.  It does not make "searches" more efficient.  It might seem to make manual browsing or scanning posts more "efficient", by virtue of there being less to scan (yet how many folks look at all the posts anyway?).  But unanswered posts indicate a lot - outstanding problems that potentially haven't been solved, a reality check on such, and - and here's the kicker - the quality & quantity of attention BB is giving to their customers.  As another poster pointed out - rather than deleting unanswered posts - answer them ! 

Another suggestion: upgrade to Community Server 2008.5 (SP2).  The new version has an optional "Q&A" forum post approach which is very useful to all involved.  The other new or improved features, not limited to forums, could also be profitably used here.

In any case, six months is actually very recent, especially for such lightly trafficked forums.  After five years or so, you may want to archive posts in no longer applicable categories.  But delete ?  Never.

Take a look at http://dev.comunityserver.com/forums for some ideas in forum organization, use of Q&A, and their moderation / answering practices.

Certainly, delete spam posts.  That's S.O.P.  As for legitimate posts, apparent orphan or not, leave them alone. 

And thanks for the chance to contribute !