Community Archiving announcement

[Martin-O2]

Hey everyone, 

The community has content going back as far as 2008 and much of this content is now out of date, incorrect or about products and services that are no longer provided by O2. Due to this and to improve the performance of the community we will soon begin archiving this older content.

How will archiving work? 

Archiving will remove topics from the public boards but not delete it. The content will no longer be visible on the boards or come up when using the search feature but it wont be deleted permanently. The process is automated using the admin features of the community. We can set filters to only target older topics with no recent replies or views. The archiving process wont have any effect on your stats and any topics started by you that have been archived will be listed on your user profile. 

Why are we doing this? 

By archiving old and out of date content the search feature will perform better as out dated content will no longer be displayed. In addition, removing this older content will improve the speed and functionality of the community on the whole, providing a better user experience for our members and visitors. 

What content will be archived? 

To begin with we will only be archiving old content on the help boards. Welcome & News, Off Topic, Discussions & Feedback and guides and reviews wont be touched. As a start we will be archiving content older than 2012 and then review to see if any additional archiving is required. We will also be creating a "white list" of older but still relevant content that wont be removed. Archived content that is reached via a URL or google search will be redirected to more recent content. 

As a community member you shouldn't notice any impact as we go through this process. If you have any questions about the up-coming archiving project please let me know in the comments below. 

[pgn]

Now this poses a question - will the purge also take uploaded pics, GIFs, etc along with the post containing them? Or will all images languish in a user's account, now undisplayed as the post showing them has been consigned to the pre-2008 bin of unwantedness, or will a targetted seek-and-destroy be required by each poster?

If so, how does a poster sort the images they have uploaded by date to click-select those of pre-2008 vintage only? And what of guides and reviews, do they need to be refreshed to date-stamp them and images and YouTube video links in them (if impacted) to a date more recent than 2008?

Housekeeping, eh? And we were only talking of TNS and the feather duster yesterday 😂

[Martin-O2]

@pgn the archiving process won't have any impact on your uploaded images. The images will stay in your gallery even if the topic that the image was posted on is archived. 

We wont be touching guides and reviews unless they are out of date so no action needed on the existing guides.