What's your policy on post baggage

[ibaker]

Like many others my main site has been going for many years, it has gone from a free forum to WebWiz to vBulletin to XF, now at 222,000 posts and has seen all kinds of mods and addons over the years.

Having a look at some of the old threads and posts I realised that my site is carrying around a huge amount of baggage that I am paying for yet adds no value to my site today. I have seen threads that contains posts like (as an example):
Post 1
"Who is doing what this Saturday"
Post 2
"I am doing this"
Post 3
"I am doing that"
etc etc etc

Meanwhile my database is growing huge, searching takes longer, so many old files taking up hosting space, old mods/addons that don't perform a clean uninstall, hosting needs more ram and processor resources, more disk space, so much more to maintain like defunct smilies...all in all there is so much that is not only costing me more money to maintain and making maintenance take so much longer when possibly 25 to 33% adds no value to my site what so ever.

So I am interested to hear what others have as perhaps a kind of policy on what they do, if anything, about the baggage that their site carries around because a day will come when carrying around all this baggage can cause great headaches.

 

[JABRONI]

I have no problem with it. I made my forum for my YouTube subscribers to post whatever they felt like, and that's what they do. They all have no problem donating if we have to upgrade servers & all that, which is great.

 

[dieketzer]

ive always viewed time-based deletion of messages and the like to be a betrayal of the membership. i have no doubt my own members would see it as such if i began to selectively delete the history of the community.

 

[ibaker]

I know that everyone has different reasons for their sites and that would most likely dictate any such policy on post retention etc however there are also many sites, like mine, that have been established as more of a resource of information on a specific subject as opposed to a "chat" style of site. So I am seeing general chat type of posts that are 5 - 9 years old that don't add value to, as in my case, a resource of helpful and safety information for aviators.

Completely agree, leave the old chat posts in where a forum is based on this, but what I would like to know is when your site is considered as a "resource" of information.

 

[MagnusB]

My policy is to disallow the thin content forums in robots.txt. For now I only have the welcome forum disallowed. Dunno if that is really what you are looking for, but I have seen that such posts actually reduces the first barrier for new users to make the first post and start participating. For some reason most feel more comfortable replying to a thread rather than starting a new one.

 

[Ingenious]

I'd like to see an ability to archive off very old content (mine goes back to 2001) which I think is a feature IPB now has. Having said that, some old content can be useful and it's always hard to know when it will come in handy. As an example, my off topic forum generates some incoming traffic on a diverse range of subjects.

But I agree that a large % of post content can be bloat. For me, I now have a proactive policy of pruning out excessive quoting as an example as and when it is posted, plus, I merge multiple posts (in a row) from the same member.

Neither of those really address your question of whether to remove actual post content or not, but it can help

 

[Slavik]

As long as its not complete drivvel we allow most content to stand.

 

[Mouth]

Create a read-only forum called 'Archives' or similar, move all such baggage topics into there. Use robots.txt to rope it off.

 

[Alpha1]

I remove all posts and thread that do not add anything. Content is King.
i.e. many of my old posts and threads are deleted. Over 200.000 threads.
We manually review each and every post.

 

[AndyB]

Like many others my main site has been going for many years, it has gone from a free forum to WebWiz to vBulletin to XF, now at 222,000 posts and has seen all kinds of mods and addons over the years.

Having a look at some of the old threads and posts I realised that my site is carrying around a huge amount of baggage that I am paying for yet adds no value to my site today. I have seen threads that contains posts like (as an example):
Post 1
"Who is doing what this Saturday"
Post 2
"I am doing this"
Post 3
"I am doing that"
etc etc etc

I suggest creating an Off Topic forum for threads like you described, that way you can easily prune that forum every few years knowing important threads are not lost.

Meanwhile my database is growing huge, searching takes longer...

Get ElasticSearch it will make searching extremely fast.