New Message Pruning and Archiving Policies -- please read!

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Folks,

The new version of UBB.x allows us to archive older messages, saving bandwidth and "wear and tear" on the live message base. From now on, here's how we'll be handling this.

(1) Once a week, the system will automatically archive all threads which haven't had a post for more than 60 days.

(2) Once a month, the system will automatically prune out all threads which haven't had a post in 90 days. (This will not involve any archived threads.)

You'll always be able to access archived messages and threads, but you won't be able to post to them.

Once every few months I will go in and "hand prune" any topics that seem to need special attention: mostly this is probably going to involve topics in Chatter II.

Any questions?

[Gryphon]

All that sounds good to me.

But uhh... If the system automatically archives all threads that haven't been posted in for 60 days, then how will it prune out non-archive threads that haven't been posted in over 90 days?

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

If I have it right, archiving a thread doesn't automatically remove it from the "live" database. It only copies it to the archive. Pruning has to happen separately.

At least, that's what I gather from Infopop. Let's wait a week for the first archiving cycle, and see what happens.

[EWizard11]

Does this mean that enormous threads -specifically the TTOGR- are going to have early pages pruned out, or do the new pruning guidelines only involve entire threads?

[Gryphon]

If I have it right, archiving a thread doesn't automatically remove it from the "live" database. It only copies it to the archive. Pruning has to happen separately.
-Lee

Ah. That makes much more sense. Thankies.

Hmm... I had something to say but uh... I forgot.

...And people keep telling me stuff like this shouldn't happen 'til I'm AT LEAST 60. Ah well.

[Birdhead]

Okay. Cool. Thanks.

I had something to say but uh... I forgot.

...And people keep telling me stuff like this shouldn't happen 'til I'm AT LEAST 60. Ah well.

Hah... well if that's true, I'm definitely old for my age!

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Originally posted by EWizard11:
Does this mean that enormous threads -specifically the TTOGR- are going to have early pages pruned out, or do the new pruning guidelines only involve entire threads?

In the case of TTOGR, the earliest pages were pruned before the Eve upgrade happened. This is in line with policy established late last year by DD: the TTOGR and Chatter messages were way outnumbering all other messages in the Forums. In terms of fulfilling the Forums' "mission" -- to be a place where people can talk about the books -- this made little sense. So it was ordained that Chatter would contain no more than 5000 messages at a time, and TTOGR no more than 3000.

Archiving means we'll be changing these policies a little too, for these two areas. Once we're sure the archiving is working correctly, the "live" Chatter will be cut down to 2000 messages and the "live" TTOGR to 1000. Everything else will go into the archive. We'll see what the size of the archive does to the costs of running the forums, since DD has to to pay more for extra storage space.

One possibility which has crossed both DD's and my minds is that Eve contains an extra module, called "Thrive", in which members can pay for "premium services". We're looking into what exactly this means. It might be possible for members interested in the oldest archived material to pay for the privilege of accessing it, which would relieve DD of some of the ($$$) burden of keeping all those extra messages around. If "Thrive" can't be tailored in this way, though, we're just going to have to fall back to watching how the archived messages drive our costs up. DD loves you guys dearly, and likes to have you happy with the content of the Forums: but the content of a lot of the TTOGR messages is, mmm, less than earthshaking. And examination of the Forum logs shows that a very, very few people (compared to the total Forum membership: maybe fifty Forum users out of nearly a thousand) bother to look at them. So you do the math.

...Yet on the other hand, unquestionably TTOGR is part of the "ecosystem" of the Forums, which DD is loth to axe...unless things get too "unrelated" in there, or the running cost of the whole Forum goes up. So I'll say now what I've said before: make your posts there count. Save to disk, locally, anything that would break your hearts to lose.

As regards thread archiving: I *think* a whole thread is archived at once, when it happens. We'll have to wait a little to see, as I hand-pruned a whole lot of inactive threads before the migration to Eve. Threads that have messages less than sixty days old, though, won't be touched.

[Gryphon]

Hmmm... Well, why archive the Topic of Great Randomness? It's so huge and it's not like anyone is going to want to go back and look at every post. If there are posts that people like or whatever, they should go ahead and save the post into a notepad file or print it up. As for the live Topic of Great Randomness posts, we don't need more than 1,000. NO ONE (that is sane) will go back and look at every single post, especially if they number to above 5,000.

Anyone else have opinions on this?