There’s stuff in our forum that we’d probably want to archive at some point. Think of long resolved incident reports from 2020 or 2021 that are still prominently popping up in our searches, categories and other lists. Maybe these old posts shouldn’t limit our community to have a look at more current and relevant posts. Now there’ll be questions like under what conditions do we want to archive and where would we still be able to consult the archive? And of course there’s the practical question of how this platform (Discourse) allows us to do so?
Probably the Discourse Meta forum could reveal experiences from other community fora built with the same tool. So I have researched that about Archiving strategies. In short, we find three slightly distinct functionalities: Archiving, Closing, Unlisting. Explanation.
In practice: if we just Archive a post, it’s still visible in the category listing. If we also Unlist it, it won’t show up in such lists anymore. Now it’s still there, if you know the link. I applied it to this incident post (solved last year).
Now that it is Archived-Unlisted, how would one be able to still discover it without knowing the link? Discourse suggests to add “?status=archive” to the forum domain, but it doesn’t seem to work. But it does work in the search function, like this: https://forum.meet.coop/search?q=status%3Aarchived But that doesn’t list Unlisted archived posts… Any better suggestions? cc @3wc @Hakanto