Archiving Discussions
Paul Smith
Public
Seen by 132
The card on Trello has 4 votes so it seems like there's support for this feature.
Use cases:
1) A user creates a dummy discussion as an example or for testing and then realises it's in their group history forever. The User or Group wants to get rid of this discussion and never see it again.
2) A user creates a discussion within a group, a consensus is reached, the decision is acted on and "completed". The Group then wants to put this discussion into a seperate area so that it can be looked at or referenced later but isn't in the list of what is currently being decided on.
Questions
How would we want this to work and what would it look like?
Will archived discussions still be viewable? Or should there be an option when archiving to keep it in history or not. (check box?)
If archived discussions are still viewable
Will archived discussions be locked? Eg/ Can someone still comment or create a proposal on an archived discussion?
Is it better to be able to dig up "dead" discussions or start a fresh new discussion referencing the old one?
Jon Lemmon Wed 31 Oct 2012 6:27AM
These are all questions for our users aren't they? Maybe we can conduct a few quick user interview questions and to figure out what people want.
My gut feeling is that we want to start as simple as possible with this feature. From what I've heard, the biggest need at the moment is for an admin to be able to hide a conversation from a group that is misleading or problematic. But I could be wrong.
Jon Lemmon Wed 31 Oct 2012 6:29AM
PS - Thanks for starting this conversation. =)
Aaron Thornton Wed 31 Oct 2012 9:47AM
Once we have @mentions we could get user feedback at with the ease of a prompt mention...
Benjamin Knight Thu 1 Nov 2012 12:29AM
Super keen to see this happen! Most urgent thing is admin ability to archive test discussions to get them out of the way so new people coming in don't get confused by junk. One possibility is that archiving shifts things into the "previous decisions" list, but its focus could be expanded out to "older discussions/decisions". Sensible starting point?
Jon Lemmon Fri 2 Nov 2012 12:46AM
I don't think it should be shifted into the "previous decisions" list, because that is a list of proposals, not discussions. However, perhaps we could make an identical feature, only titled "archived" or "hidden discussions". It might only be viewable to admins, and they would have the ability to "unhide" a discussion, or to delete it entirely.
Thoughts?
Benjamin Knight Sat 3 Nov 2012 1:09AM
Jon, I was suggesting that "previous decisions" could be broadened out to "previous discussions/decisions" so it could include both. Just an idea - separating them out might make more sense
Richard D. Bartlett Sat 3 Nov 2012 1:20AM
I prefer Jon's take over Ben's. The 'previous decisions' list is a record of group activity. The 'archived discussions' list is a list of stuff that happened that nobody needs to look at.
I'd probably start by making it visible to anyone in the group, in the interests of transparency, just hidden one click away in exactly the way the Previous Decisions list is.
Benjamin Knight Sat 3 Nov 2012 1:28AM
Sounds good to me
Jon Lemmon Sat 3 Nov 2012 3:45AM
Visible to anyone? Hmm... what are the use cases here?
- Group has a discussion that now needs to be hidden from new users (this has already happened in the Enspiral group)
- User creates a confusing discussion that isn't helpful for the group and should be hidden
If we go with private, we knock out both use cases. Public we only knock out use case number 2. Currently there is no way in the app to hide a discussion. If I didn't have server access Enspiral would have been put in an awkward spot after the member nominations went through. Anyway, I'm not saying that hidden discussions should definitely be private. Just wanted to point out the consequences of both options. Can we think of any other use cases here?
Paul Smith · Tue 30 Oct 2012 10:31PM
Sorry the discussion info is a bit of a mess but I wanted to get the brainstorming process started.
What I'm currently thinking is that the archive button would be in the "show discussion" page, and have two options: Archive to and Delete.
The Delete would effectively archive the discussion into the database abyss where it's just never displayed but the data is still stored.
Archive to History could have it's own filter in the groups page so you can look through archived discussions.
Personally I think once a discussion is archived it should be locked and if at a later date it needs discussing again it would be best to just start fresh and reference the archived discussion.
Thoughts?