TL:DR – Outdated discussions become a bigger problem over time. Create a process to archive low-value discussions, update key ones with fresh insights and clearly label older posts with warnings about their age.
If you ask a question in an enterprise community today, you might get an answer that solves that problem.
However, companies constantly change, rename, or tweak features.
That correct answer today might not be the correct answer tomorrow.
And if you multiply this by tens of thousands of discussions a community attracts each year, you have a problem. Over time, the majority of discussions hosted in your community might not provide an answer that solves the problem.
Even if just 5% of answers go out of date each year (which is low), this quickly increases over time.
You can see this in the theoretical chart below.
This means your community might eventually cause more frustration than it relieves.
This isn’t such a big problem when the community is new, but it becomes a killer for more mature communities. That’s because as communities age, so do the discussions.
For example, there are discussions in the Adobe Photoshop community which are nearly 20 years old.
How many 20-year-old answers are still accurate and relevant?
Many mature communities are in a similar situation – they host answers that no longer solve the problem.
This means the vast majority of visitors to a community will soon be landing on discussions which don’t give them the answer to their questions.
Can’t You Just Delete Old Discussions?
The simplest solution is periodically deleting discussions after [x] number of years.
But there are three huge problems with this.
- Old discussions might still be solving lots of problems. You could be removing lots of great answers to eliminate the wrong ones. You can easily do more harm than good.
- It will affect post counts and gamification. Discussions are typically tied to members’ post counts. Imagine how members will feel if they lose hundreds of answers they’ve posted in the past—and the ranking levels they might drop.
- It will break things. It will probably affect your search results, internal links, and more. Your community search traffic might plummet as a result of removing old discussions.
So deleting old discussions isn’t a solution – we need a better approach.
We need a two-pronged approach. We must select the discussions causing problems and then decide what to do with them.
Identifying And Selecting The Right Discussions
We want to focus on the discussions that are causing problems.
This generally focuses on three things:
- Age of the discussion. We probably don’t want to remove discussions posted within the last 18 months. That’s still too fresh.
- Level of traffic. One school of thought is you should focus on the discussion that is receiving lots of traffic – they’re the most popular you need to focus on. The other is you should remove the discussions that are receiving little to no traffic – they’re not delivering any value.
- Quality of the answer. Did the discussion receive an answer or not? Should it be removed if it didn’t receive an answer? Or should we ignore those discussions? If it did receive an answer, how do we know if the answer still solves the problem?
I asked a question on my LinkedIn a few days ago. Part of the problem that a couple of readers didn’t quite grasp is scale.
Yes, you can manually go through dozens of answers, perhaps even a few hundred, to see if the answer still solves the question.
But you can’t go through thousands (although this seems like a task ripe for AI).
So, we can highlight three obvious categories of discussions:
- The most popular discussions each year. These discussions attract the most traffic (the 80/20 rule). List your top 50 to 100 discussions by views over the past year.
- Discussions which receive no traffic or have no answers. These discussions generate no value for the community. This includes every discussion which doesn’t attract any views or doesn’t have an answer after 18 months.
- Discussions flagged by members as out of date. One problem with the common practice of closing old discussions to new posts is it eliminates the ability of members to flag if it’s out of date. I’d suggest either enabling commenting on old discussions or having an option which lets members flag dissatisfaction with old discussions.
Then, we have the algorithm discussions. These are discussions where you run an automated process to identify any queries that might be out of date using a combination of things like:
- 24+ months old.
- 1+ answer.
- 10+ visitors per month (it might not be worthwhile removing those with less traffic).
- Updates in relevant knowledge articles for product(s) / features.
- Member continues to visit discussions after visiting this one (suggesting they didn’t get the answer).
This example requires access to the relevant data, but you get the idea. This is where you automatically identify key types of discussions.
What To Do About Old Discussions
We already know we can’t just delete old discussions, so we’re left with a few options:
1. Archive them. The best and most popular option is to archive them in a community location that only registered members can access. They might still appear in internal searches, but they won’t attract thousands of visitors from other search engines. This also avoids impacting the metrics of members and doesn’t break any existing links. This is usually the easiest of the three tasks to do.
2. Update them. Another approach is to keep the top discussions in a community up to date. Edit them frequently with fresh insights and information. Link to relevant articles (automatically on the sidebar or in the content itself). Make sure they contain the best possible information.
3. Flag the age for readers in the answer. Similar to newspapers (below), highlight the age of answers and posts which are two years old. This carries an implicit warning to readers that the response may be out of date. This should be a default feature in most platforms.
Yes, members can see the date themselves – but they might not notice the date. Hence why a simple note of: ‘This answer is [x] years’ old’. This is similar to what most newspapers do.
4. Label the discussions. A similar option is to label old discussions as old discussions simply. This can be by a tag or simply by updating the title ‘[Old/legacy] How do I get my iphone to sync?’ This gives the same indicator without changing or customising the platform itself.
What’s the Best Approach To Each Situation?
The best approach ultimately comes down to your own unique situation and resources. If you’ve got the resources, you can implement all of the above. If you’re limited, then do what you can with the resources you have.
To quote the old saying, just because you can’t do the right thing all the time doesn’t mean you can’t do the right thing any of the time.
p.s. I wrote about our past work doing this for a past client here.
p.s. 7% increase in satisfaction score by cleaning up old discussions.
Summary
Let’s summarise what we’ve covered.
- Identify outdated discussions: Focus on discussions over 18–24 months old, especially those with high traffic, no traffic, or flagged as outdated by members.
- Archive low-value content: Move discussions with no traffic or no answers to an archive accessible only to registered members to preserve search functionality and avoid breaking links.
- Update key discussions: Regularly refresh top discussions with updated information, links to resources, and the best possible insights to keep them relevant.
- Flag or label older discussions: Clearly mark discussions over two years old with warnings about their age or tags like “[Old/Legacy]” to inform readers of potential obsolescence.
- Maintain consistently: Set a regular schedule for updating, archiving, and tagging discussions based on their category and importance, balancing effort with available resources.
