Why are idle user groups locked?

[tst]

I got an email saying that a user group "has been marked as [Idle] due to inactivity" and that "no one may join the group nor are any posts allowed". The User Group Owner Policies document says that "Your user group must be capable of sustaining ongoing activity" but there is no mention of what is actually required. There is also no mention there of locking the group and I don't understand the logic behind that.

Even if the user group is idle, locking it is only going to make sure it stays that way. Why not leave it open and give it a chance to come back to life in the future?

[altenbach]

Spammers sometimes try to post in idle corners of the site to avoid detection, so it is probably good to somehow limit the fragmentation. Not sure if this is part of the reason.

[markwni]

Hi @tst 

Thank you for the question. The User Group Owner Policies document links to the Community Content Archive Policy which states that inactive means “no new posts and no new members for 1 year.” For this audit, we extended that to 2 years because of the pandemic. We’ve also changed the policy from archiving (removing) the group to marking it as idle and locking it. We will update the public policies to indicate that change.

We changed the policy to allow groups to be reopened without having to start from scratch. But we will lock the groups because non-active areas in the Community are opportunities for spammers and other bad actors (and we want to prevent them from taking over the world). When we do not have members paying attention to an area, we miss disruptive posts. For instance, the thread with the highest traffic in 2021 was a thread buried in an ignored area that had cracked games attached. We only noticed it because of the extra traffic to that thread.

We will happily reopen groups when an organizer contacts us, which is why we leave the instructions in the post. We’ve already had one group reach out. The post encouraged them to think about ways they could re-engage. We will be reopening that group and connecting the organizers to our developer relations manager, @nancyj, who is working to support user groups going forward.

I hope that explains the current situation. Let us know if there is a group that you want to re-engage with.

Thanks,

Mark

[Hooovahh]

I was asked by a user group  years ago to present on a topic remotely, so I did.  I posted the slides, example VIs, and I think it was recorded and posted.  Over the years when someone would ask about this subject I would often point them to the post I made in that user group which covered the topic quite well.  It looks like that user group was deleted from NI's forums.  All the content built up over the years, and all the presentations given seem to be gone.  Now all my links on the forums answering people's questions by sending them to where my slides were go nowhere.  After someone realized the user group was deleted they made a new one, which now has 6 members in it.  It seems there wasn't a way to notify the old members that the subforum was being deleted, or archived.  If this lost content could be recovered that would be great.

Old User Group

New One

[nancyj]

Also, I am actively working with existing groups and helping new groups kick off. 

Mark, Jen and I are working on an intake form so that new users of LabVIEW can signup. 

Then we will include that link on the User Group section of the community. And Ed Services will link to that. 

We hope to have this up by the end of the year. Please send questions my way. 

[tst]

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@markwni wrote:

We’ve also changed the policy from archiving (removing) the group to marking it as idle and locking it.

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I really dislike NI's policy of "let's just remove old stuff to make the site more responsive and more relevant". The old stuff has value. It's good that in this case the decision was changed, but it's not good that it had to be explicitly changed. This isn't the first time we have complained of valuable stuff disappearing.

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@markwni wrote:

We will happily reopen groups when an organizer contacts us

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I can understand the logic behind not wanting spam, but I would suggest that if possible, this should be modified so that instead of locking the group, you change it so that only members can post in it and that no one can join while the group is locked (and maybe have a clear way for people to message the group admin). That way, new spammers will be blocked (as well as, unfortunately, potential new members), but the group can be revived by its members if desired.

[AeroSoul]

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@tst wrote:

I really dislike NI's policy of "let's just remove old stuff to make the site more responsive and more relevant". The old stuff has value. It's good that in this case the decision was changed, but it's not good that it had to be explicitly changed. This isn't the first time we have complained of valuable stuff disappearing.

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The amount of times i am searching for solutions to a problem i have and encounter dead links to NI forum is truly annoying.

Most of the white papers linked in old forum threads are dead, but often marked as a solution.