- Joined
- Jan 1, 2001
- Messages
- 60,101
On XenFans we archive content quite actively.
- Spam posts
- User posts
- Staff posts
There are other situations, examples, and policies that we have, but they're minor and not really worth mentioning.
I hope this information helps other site owners think about the way they organize their content, or perhaps give us tips on how to improve on this without increasing workload.
- Spam posts
These days when a spam post is made, the in-line option to process Spam takes care of it. But we go a step further and don't just delete it. We analyze the spam and process it by contacting the right companies involved, etc.
Helping not just prevent it from happening to our site again, but helping prevent these users from hopefully doing it to other sites. It's against most community rules to spam, and it's simply disruptive to the community.
All the spam gets merged into a single thread in the private "archive/". And every once in a while when we're done analyzing and processing it, we prune the content. This allows us to keep 'real' content and their statistics more natural and honest.
- User posts
Users are great, but not perfect. And that's ok. We want opinions, constructive feedback, controversial discussions, and provoking thoughts; It helps the community be active, but more importantly keeping it interesting enough.
However, once in a while content is breaking the rules, or the user doesn't realize what they published was against the rules, or disruptive to the conversation. Per post and per user we review if it should stay but perhaps leave a friendly pointing out to the rules. Sometimes we decide to 'delete' the post, and in rare cases we ban the user.
I put delete within quotes because we never delete content. We always move it to our "archive/" where we store user content. I strongly am against hard delete, and with archived content it means we can discuss it internally with other admins, perhaps reconsider our actions, etc.
If we ban a user we also consider moving their content to our archive. As a consequence for their actions. A controversial action, but in my opinion an effective one (for various reasons).
- Staff posts
Team members have access to certain forums within our administrative category, where I believe we have active content, and content that we expect the team members to read. Cluttering it with outdated content is not needed. Our policy is that the super-admin reviews the dsicussion, revisit it or finalize it and eventually archive it.
Of course, at any point if a user or staff members desires to revisit the thread, we can restore it.
Staff content that gets archived goes into the "archive-staff/" which covers all time. Whereas the user content is organized in the current year + an archive for anything older than the current year.
There are other situations, examples, and policies that we have, but they're minor and not really worth mentioning.
I hope this information helps other site owners think about the way they organize their content, or perhaps give us tips on how to improve on this without increasing workload.