So,
At the end of all the topics is a statement that says something like “Topic will be closed after 6 months”, so is this something we want? I know in the past I have reopened old posts and commented on post much much older than this. Does this mean we cannot bring an old post “To the fore…” so to speak ? that would be a disaster…
Note: “…after last reply”, so that time period gets extended for as long as the topic is reasonably active. With the ease of “linking” an old topic to new ones we start, I think we can effectively do the same as you describe. I can see advantages either way.
Jeff said a closed topic can be reopened upon demand… but I also wonder what motivates here in practice that “feature” over a less procedural, all is opened approach.
There are several reasons. The most critical is to cut down on spam.
We have topics that have been open for 20 years. Spammers will create a new user and post spam to an older topic, hoping no one will see it. We average 2 to 4 events a week of this type.
Closing topics after a year will reduce this problem.
I have expanded the two largest categories, Elan and Plus2, to autoclose a year after the last reply. Everything else is 6 months.
If autoclose creates significant issues, I will turn off the autoclose and reopen all the topics. Nothing is finite; we just slap some on some glass, resin, and bondo and it looks like new.
Indeed any spam would be damaging the quality of the forum (I on occasion refrain to comment so as not to needlessly dilute an interesting thread). I sure understand how making maintenance efficient is of the essence to keep the forum.
While talking about the migration, I just realized a question that I did not anticipate (maybe I did not pay enough attention…): will private messages saved under directories other than in and sent be eventually migrated, too ?
I’ve tried to look around a bit, but all I see is inbox sent new unread and archive , while I had several other directories with saved correspondance (initially maximum 100 mail per “box”, then this limit was upped to 300 iirc), 4 or 5 directories I would say (the maximum initially allowed)
This system does not use a folder system to store emails. They are either in your inbox or your archive folder.
In the old system you had a little over 300 discrete messages. These have been converted into 139 message threads containing the discrete messages. For example one of your message threads has 16 discrete messages.
I did a quick sql query looking at message counts in both systems and the numbers are very similar.
Remember, in this new system you can use advance search functions to search your messages only.
it looks like they’re all in the inbox, I suppose it took a little time for all s39 threads to show when paging down since I found more now than I did during earlier tries (several pages down rather than just one) - they were a bit sorted by themes among the previously allowed boxes, but if all is there that’s fine I’ll just look for stuff when I need it.
Actually I had previously used the trick of saving only few messages in a longer thread to keep all the content while minimizing the number of saved messages: the previous restriction of number of saved messages was a strong constraint after a while…