♻ Cleaning 🆚 Hoarding Posts 📚

Question

There are people (usually older accounts) with thousands of answered questions & posts on Q/A.. & then there are people with no more than maybe one/two-hundred posts in total at all times.

I was wondering which one of these would be viewed as more beneficial.

Is it better to keep ALL info just in case someone in the future may find it useful, or is it better to clean out and organize posts from the past?

Would a question/answer buried under 1000 other questions/answers ever be seen again anyway?

Answer 1

Biggest problem is a lack of categories. This could also help track already asked questions, update outdated ones etc. This forum is a horrendous mess. Archive, Trash, and Off-topic are the most important ones. Mods need to be able to pin (make sticky) posts. About 30% or more should be deleted (eg "Hi" tagged new, noob, nobody-gives-a-crap) and questions like "Help" can go to Trash or be deleted at mod discretion. Finally, display by date, not "trending" and maybe advertise the "trending" threads.
Basically waaay more order required.

Answer 2

Fully agree with Jamie, but please never make this place like StackOverflow, no need to be super-serious in every single thing, just clean a bit the "trash threads". ;)

Answer 3

I agree. Categories would solve many issues. When it comes to the tags and the algorithms that Sololearn uses in the search, they should implement that for those individual categories instead of having one single search-bar for everything. That would make it easier to sort through needed/unneeded posts and make it much easier for the few people that actually check to see if a question has already been asked/answered before posting a question that's been asked twelve times already.

I do remember one of the devs mentioning that they have been actively working on a better Q/A when it comes to organization, so maybe we'll see a form of this idea implemented :)

I know Sololearn developers are skittish when it comes to granting mods and other users power, so maybe they could hit three birds with one stone by replacing the downvote feature with a flag feature.. so that if a user considers a post to be spam or unneeded, they can flag it for review - and after it's been flagged so many times (like 10+ or so), have Sololearn automatically generate a notification for each mod of the post being flagged and offer each mod a chance to contribute to the community by voting (behind the scenes) on whether or not the post needs taken down.

Answer 4

@Maz -- The lesson-comments slipped my mind actually. Thanks for including those in the topic because those need cleaned out desperately lol. I've been planning on running through each of them and cleaning out my own comments if they don't serve enough of a purpose. and that brings up another suggestion for sololearn.. I think there should be a button or feature of some sort that allows you to jump through a thread to your own posts. Having to scan 500 answers for your own answer that was posted a long time ago can be tedious for sure.

Answer 5

@Hatsy -- When I (and assuming we) mentioned implementing the categorizing of posts, the suggestion had to do with offering the users the ability to specify a category for their own questions/posts in the future. If this would be implemented, by default, all Q/A posts' categories from the past could be labeled as "unspecified" until the owner of that post edits/changes it.

I also mentioned in one of my comments that implementing a "flag" option in place of the downvote option on posts could help by being programmed to send notifications to all moderators once a post is flagged by 10+ users as spam. Alongside this (and behind the scenes), there could be an interface exclusively available to moderators that choose to contribute to these 10+ flagged posts by voting amongst themselves on whether or not to remove it. Example would be if 6 mods voted no and 3 voted yes, the post would be unaffected.. etc.

Answer 6

@Maart this is not possible since upvotes are mostly based on followers, too much useful threads would be deleted. :/

Anyway, could be a good idea, i seen too much users with 500-1000 posts made in few weeks but their answers are only to general questions or non-technical questions... i don't know if it is a bad thing, but if you (i'm speaking in general) answer to 900 questions and no one of this answers was of a specific argument, maybe it's time to study and close the Q&A.

Could be a bad idea too, i often search my questions on Google with the "Sololearn" keyword at the end... there are many useful threads made 5/6 months ago, by old/inactive users as well.

Did you think about Lesson Comments? Now Sololearn considers that comments as part of our Activity Feed... but the most helpful answers were written one year ago about. :3

Answer 7

As crazy as this sounds - A manual clean-up is required. It is hard and risky to categorize threads using date or even upvotes. Problems will occur if we have downvoted threads which contain very useful posts. Dealing with our current unsorted Q&A, the only effective way to remove junk and preserve useful resources at the same time throughout the entire Q&A section is to designate a team of users/mods to review and remove useless threads, all the way back to the first thread in Q&A existence.

Answer 8

I always wanted to suggest these categories.
1) Programming
2) Sololearn
3) Other
If a "hi" type question is posted in programming/sololearn category, it will be deleted by moderators. There should be a limit to number of "other" posts in a day.

Answer 9

I guess it also helps to keep track of the badges + contributor pie chart if they save them all. And some questions might still be used after ages (top questions, useful books, beginner advice, etc), but then again they could just remove all questions with less than 5 upvotes. They won't be of massive influence to many people and that would already be most posts from the past

Answer 10

Interesting perspective! While it's great to have a lot of posts, I think the quality of information is what really matters. Cleaning out older, less relevant posts could help streamline your content and make it easier for others to find the most useful https://www.sanitairllc.com/ information. What are your thoughts on finding that balance?