Can threads be closed after a period of inactivity (I thought that was supposed to happen) or after a poster has come to a decision? Leaving old posts open creates needless work for moderators.
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I’ll tag @CC_Sorin and @CC_Jon . Threads are supposed to close after six months of inactivity, but for some reason many old threads seem to stay open.
It would be great if a thread would automatically close after a poster has reached a decision, but I don’t know how that would be possible unless the poster flags a thread and asks mods to close it.
This thread is probably what @happy1 is referring to:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/t/st-andrews-vs-colby/
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I also think when the last upgrade happened, some previously closed old threads opened again. The odd thing to me…these oldies appear in latest threads every so often…even though there are no new posts. I think this might be because someone liked a post or something.
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My observation is that chance me threads auto close but others do not. Not sure though.
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I think a week of inactivity is a good time to close a thread. Why 6 months?
I’ll be happy with 6 months. Or to expand the auto close feature in chance me site-wide.
To be fair, that thread is 21 days old. There will be many “I just got off the WL and need to decide today” threads. What would be more helpful is if the OP of these threads came back with their decision.
Agree totally that the optimal answer is for the OP to share the final choice. I just wonder if it is counterproductive when posters continue to comment/give opinions after a decision is finalized.
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Sure. But when the OP makes a decision, I set the thread to auto close after a day of inactivity to allow any parting thought and well wishes.
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Perhaps they could automatically close after decisions are due?
Moderators do so much to keep this site working well…to the extent things can be done automatically it could make things a little easier.
I’m not sure how that could be accomplished since decision dates vary, especially as we’re now in waitlist season. Regardless, that’s a one-off that warrants less attention than getting much older threads closed, IMO.
I have no problem with the six month thing. But if a family doesn’t choose to come back and tell their choice…that’s their decision. I guess it bothers me when folks ask and ask…especially when they haven’t even been part of the thread until the asking post!
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I think it’s actually okay if a thread stays open for awhile after a decision seems to have been made. It will usually naturally die off after a week or so anyway . Not sure there needs to be an immediate rush to close a thread once someone has said they’ve made a decision. Especially with long threads that had alot of activity and interest.
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Chance Me / Match Me! threads close after 3 months. We also have College Search & Selection set to autoclose after 6 months. I want to talk a little bit about why we set it up that way and what I think we should consider doing going forward.
Closing old threads is a balancing act. We really don’t want people chiming in on outdated threads because it’s better to start a new thread. But what counts as outdated? Chance me threads are somewhat easy to classify because after a few months the student has probably gotten what they want from the thread. New comments are unlikely to be helpful after, say, the student has applied to their schools.
But it’s harder to gauge other categories. Obviously threads related to applications before 2023 are now outdated. But what about general advice on test-optional applications? Or what about advice about a particular department/program/major? While it might not be timely for the OP, new visitors might find that information useful years after the thread starts.
More importantly, if something does change, it’s important that new information be added to a discussion. Once a topic is closed, it can’t be updated, but people can still find it via Google. It’s not clear to me that starting a new thread will help in that case. And in any case, people are much more likely to reply to an existing thread than start a new one. So we risk losing important updates if we close old threads across the board.
I decided to gather some data on users’ first posts. I divided them up into three categories:
- replies to threads older than 180 days,
- replies to newer threads and
- started a new topic.
Than I looked at aggregated stats:
| thread_type | count | % spam | average likes | average Trust Level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| responded to a newer thread | 9084 | 0.67 | 1.12 | 0.8 |
| responded to thread older than 180 days | 2514 | 1.59 | 1.18 | 0.78 |
| started new thread | 3386 | 0.71 | 0.24 | 0.66 |
So the first thing to notice is that replies to older threads are more than twice as likely to be marked spam. While we have no way to prove it will prevent spam, closing old threads prevents spammers from trying to hide spam in old (presumably unwatched) threads. Playing around with it, I found that the older the thread, the more likely a reply from a new user is spam.
Still, the spam rate is relatively low even on very old threads. Looking at the average number of likes on those posts, there’s not a significant difference. Even though these are older topics, they are roughly as appreciated as replies to new topics. Finally I looked at the Trust Level of the users. Again it’s not statistically significant. People who start by replying to old posts are just as likely to become active members of CC as anyone else.
So here’s what I’m thinking:
- Chance me threads close after 3 months of inactivity as they do now.
- Active forums close threads after 6 months of inactivity. We can assume someone will start new threads or flag a moderator to reopen if something important changes.
- Threads in forums with very little activity (generally small schools) will remain open so that someone who stumbles into a topic they want to discuss will be able to do so without the overhead of starting a new thread.
For the moment, I’m going to define “very little activity” as no new threads in the past month. That will mean the vast majority of threads are subject to closure after 6 months.
We can always adjust the thresholds in the future if notice problems. It may take a day or two to get the settings adjusted for all the categories.
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