Possible Forums Maintenance

[Laura F.]

Hello Everyone,

In my discussions with Lithium (our forum vendor) regarding performance, they have suggested some maintenance on the forums that could help with our community's performance. 

The maintenance is to "trim" subscriptions and floats (floated threads and boards) for all users in the community.  This means that if you added a message subscription or floated a thread more than 3 months ago, we would remove the subscription and/or float for you.  In long-standing communities like ours, users can build up many subscriptions and floats that can affect the performance of the entire community. 

In order to keep the floats and subscriptions that are important to you, you just need to unfloat and re-float the thread, or remove and add the message to your subscriptions again because they will then be newer than 3 months.

I must stress that there is no guarantee that this will have a noticeable benefit for performance, but Lithium has recommended that we try this because it has helped other communities in the past. 

I would like to perform this maintenance as soon as possible, but I recognize that it is the holiday season and we must give people adequate notice to take any action they find necessary.  Therefore, I propose that we do this maintenance the week of January 7th, specifically either Tuesday January 8th or Thursday January 10th. 

Please post any questions or concerns you have to this thread.

Regards,

Laura

Web Support & Operations

National Instruments

[Matthew_Williams]

Double posted from the original thread because this author failed to notice the
original poster's request to redirect responses here. 🙂

Hi Laura.  Thanks for the notice of the changes.  I'd like to make some comments:

1) The real value to me of subscriptions is that they provide a way for me to monitor interesting threads
without requiring me to remember them or read every message posted to all threads.  I get messages on only new
threads or subscriptions, so this saves me a lot of time.  Having a subscription silently deleted after 3
months would significantly reduce their utility to me.

2) As an alternative, could you move 'stale' subscriptions to my bookmarks, maybe in a
sub-heading of 'stale subscriptions' or something similar?  This way I don't permanently lose
track of something.

3) Instead of 3 months after subscription, could you make it 3 months (12 would be better) after
the last post?

4) When a subscription is to be deleted or moved, could you send an email 7 days prior with a link
to keep the change from happening?  From a practical perspective, there is no way a user can
be expected to 'refresh' all of their subscriptions without prompting.

The forum is a tremendous resource, and I think silently deleting bread crumbs that users
have set to help them find things they have identified as important is a very bad idea.  I
have had no forum performance complaints, but maybe I don't use it the same way as
others.

Thanks for all the hard work keeping things on track.

Matt

[Laura F.]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the feedback!

I think I may have not made something very clear - this operation is a one time deal.  We do not plan to do this at any regular interval, and if at any point at time that becomes necessary, we will give everyone plenty of notice.  I definitely do not want to silently delete anything 

The idea behind "trimming" your subscriptions down to only those added in the last 3 months assumes that most conversations die down by then and become not as important to you.  Of course, that is not always true which is why I wanted to give everyone enough notice to remove and re-add subscriptions that are important to them. 

For users that have many subscriptions they want to keep, this could be a time-consuming process.  I will look into whether or not we could just do this operation for floated threads and boards, since people tend to have less floats than subscriptions. 

I think once tagging is available to everyone, it can replace some of the use of floats and subscriptions because it allows you to make it easy to find threads and messages again.  Ton also brings up a good point about RSS - I also use this to track particular users.

I'll keep you updated.  I definitely wanted to get some feedback before going through with this operation.

Thanks,
Laura

P.S. Ton - I started with the largest boards for sticky (or floated) posts first.... I'll keep going

[Matthew_Williams]

Thanks for the clarification, Laura.  I definitely missed the one-time aspect.  A one-time
flush, or even an annual one, is not a big deal, especially with advance notice.  Thanks
for setting me straight.

Matt

[altenbach]

Would it make sense to set the automatic subscription option to "none" by default? Currently the default is "thread".

[Laura F.]

Hi Altenbach,

I think that is a good question.  My initial thought is that it should be kept at automatic because this is beneficial to the majority of forum users that post questions every once in a while so that they can keep track of their threads.  The large majority of our users post very infrequently and are probably not as familiar with all of the options in the software so I would like the defaults to be easy to use for them.

Thanks, and Happy Holidays!

Laura

[FakStory]

Hi,

    I have a little question for you… Do deleted threads will be accessible to us, somewhere? Kind of very old threads was very helpful for me. In another hand, frequently, number of threads ended by referring to another link; does the link will be kept? In addition, I can’t tell exactly which thread I want to keep, so, I am not able to help you keeping important thread…

I don’t know if this help or not, but that my comment…

Regards,

              Fakstory

[altenbach]

---

FakStory wrote:
    I have a little question for you… Do deleted threads will be accessible to us, somewhere?

---

They way I understand it, no threads will be deleted. The only thing that gets deleted are the subscription pointers, linking user profiles to these threads.

[TCPlomp]

Laura:
it might be an option that user get's deleted subscription get an email containing a link to all those threads or a list of RSS feeds, or an OPML file, etc. etc.

Ton

[Laura F.]

Hi Ton,

That is a good idea, but unfortunately it cannot be done.  Depending on how everyone seems to feel about this maintenance, we may scale it back to just floated threads/boards and not subscriptions while I manually deal with a few accounts that have many, many subscriptions.  Right now I am still in the decision-making stage

FakStory - Altenbach's reply was correct, no threads will be deleted.  Please let us know if this does not answer your question.

Thanks and Happy New Year Everyone!
Laura