Archiving Discussions

Yep agree with not making it a back and forth thing with hiding discussions.

I think the use case 2 (in the context above) is important too. e.g. looks like this https://www.loomio.org/discussions/1236 has been done now, no? So shouldn't it now be closed/ archived? i.e. put in an 'archived discussions' area and locked so no new comments can be made. Perhaps with a note saying something like "want to re-open this discussion? start a new one".

On this topic, I've been thinking that every thread should have an 'outcome' field, that may or may not be connected to the existing proposal outcome feature.

@richarddbartlett discussion initiators could be prompted say a fortnight after the last comment to provide an outcome or archive

We've got archives in Econsensus. We're pretty randomly flexible, so we can just shove anything into the archives - this takes trust :-) We can rarely also move something back out of the archives into life, or in our case, between decisions and proposals if we feel that it's been made erroneously.

The archives are, as you'd expect, useful for us to hide dead topics, or proposals that didn't go anywhere.

Making search find archives by default (and allowing disabling) seems like a reasonable step - people may not know the state of something they are looking for.

We also talked about the related idea of making feedback on something "old" - e.g. we have a proposal, we decide to do some stuff, and we agree to review our decisions in 6 months. In some way, if we can see that previous discussions, comments, concerns etc. are "before this review" then we can maybe re-use the same screen and start a fresh review of the same decision. Maybe if everything on a discussion is "old" then it is the same as being in the archives, or if everything on a proposal is "old" then it didn't get made. We haven't got there on this one yet :-)

Thanks @tomlord, that reminds me, it would be really great on some decisions to have a feature that automatically prompts a review in X months.

I do not know whether this would work for other groups, but because I can't help but associate Features group with something like a bug tracking system (e.g. Jira or Bugzilla) I would suggest options like Close (No more edits and comments can be added), Reopen (Need to provide a good reason and possibly to be approved by admin), Clone (if we would decide not to let open, but just start a new discussion based on existing one), Link (I will start a new discussion about this as that would require a visible discussion ID).
Sorry, that it might seem not to be so related to the initial description, but I think Closing of discussion is definitely a needed feature and could possibly postpone delete and archive problem (as for me in those cases quite a big thought on who and which level are allowed to do so is needed).

We only agreed to implement delete in Indymedia codebases for use cases like neo-nazis open-publishing propaganda videos on Indy sites and leaching our bandwidth. Since we are only talking about storing text, not images sound or video, I don't think delete is required.

I agree with @paulsmith and @aijazvidrina that it would be helpful if co-ordinators could Close a discussion, and only they could Re-Open a closed one. I agree with @jonlemmon and @richarddbartlett that 'Closed Discussions' should be archived separately from 'Previous Decisions', as well as from active discussions.

I also agree with @richarddbartlett that it would be helpful is Balsamiq mock-ups were publicly viewable, rather than requiring log-in.

Now the search feature has been enabled (yay!) I think it is more important than ever that archiving be implemented; quite a lot of top results for a few of the searches I've tried have been really old discussions/ proposals that have basically been done/ implemented - they shouldn't be the top results!

Thanks for the new Search function, that was amazingly quick (Agile?) I would add to my comment below that there should be two kinds of archiving:

• Closed:

  • for discussions which have run their course
  • still visible to group members
  • stored in a searchable 'Closed Discussion' archive
  • excluded from searches of active discussions
  • can only be Re-Opened by a Co-ordinator

• Hidden

  • for discussion which are tests, duplicates, mistakes, or relics of misuse
  • visible only to Co-ordinators
  • Can moved to Closed, or Re-Opened by Co-ordinators

I notice in the ''feature release' thread that a 'delete discussion' feature was rolled out in Feb. Once an archive function is in place, I would suggest deprecating the 'delete' function for the reasons I gave below.