[SOLVED] Why close after 7 days? Viki please stop this!

The new automatic closing of 7-day old threads has been saddening us a lot.

Since there are threads of general information which can be very useful to new members, and it would be a pity to have them closed, or to have to visit them every week and add some insignificant stuff just to keep them open.

And it’s highly annoying when you are recruiting for an upcoming drama and the thread is closed before even the drama starts.
Look at the following examples.
The first one is a thread which is very useful advice for beginners. But they can’t ask questions, nor can any of us offer any more advice, because it’s closed!
The second one is a recruiting post for Good Casting, which comes on April 27th, in ten days from now. The Channel Manager is still looking for team members, why did you have to close it for her? Should she make another one each week? Why add unnecessary bulk here?

7%20days

Yes, there are threads which are no longer relevant, especially recruiting ones. But you can never know just by looking at the date, because some old projects still need volunteers.
For instance, I have a film, Miss Baek, and I made a thread asking for moderators in other languages. It’s still valid. It has been translated in some languages but surely there are many more.
So in that case the best would be to ask the thread starter whether this can be closed.
And we can promise to revisit our own threads and to change the subject to “FINISHED” or “CLOSED” so that you can take this as an invitation to close them. And/or add a reply at the end, saying “This project is finished, the thread can be closed”.
This post of mine is an example.
image

On the other hand, there are popular threads which have been going on for years, like this one, which people still enjoy after 6 years! It’s there since 2014 and it still attracts responses.
https://discussions.viki.com/t/what-was-your-first-kdrama/1766
Or this, with more than a thousand views, 496 replies and many likes. The subject will not cease to be popular and interesting for a long time, I suspect.
https://discussions.viki.com/t/machine-translation-from-viki/25227

Fortunately the messages from before the new law are not subject to it, but there may be others that come up and don’t deserve this harsh treatment.

To summarize, please remove this unwelcome change.

@jeslynl , @mariliam
@piranna, @bozoli, @lutra, @dudie, @cgwm808, @sonmachinima,
@marykarmelina

8 Likes

@irmar - Thank you for highlighting this issue again. Additionally, I want to point out, that this post of yours does not have the 7-day closure notice - which brings me to my question from a previous topic where we discussed this issue: An out of the blue survey

What exactly is the criteria for adding the “This topic will close 7 days after the last reply” tag? At a cursory glance it appears random, but that seems awkward, so I wonder if there are key words or other criteria determining which posts receive the 7-day limit?

If indeed this will be an ongoing feature, @jeslynl @mariliam : May we please ask for the criteria and an explanation of this new (and seemingly random) feature on Discussions? Thanks!

3 Likes

Hi there @sheishun & @irmar,

The intention was to clean up the categories a little bit more and avoid old posts from getting revived, that were no longer relevant. I do agree that some posts should not fall into this category and Volunteering is not necessarily for recruitment discussions only, hence to avoid further issues I have removed this auto-close setting from the Volunteering category.

This setting was changed on March 13th. If there are any closed posts you need to me re-open, feel free to let me know!

Now for the post: An out of the blue survey which is on the General category, no such setting for auto-close existed, which is odd. I went ahead and manually removed the auto-closing function from the topic. Let me know if any new posts are popping up with auto-close messages after today to investigate where the setting is coming from and correct it.

Sorry again for this and thank you for tagging me on this one. Keep them coming! :star_struck:

Cheers,
Mariliam

6 Likes

As far as I understood this post was originally made on the Volunteer category and then removed to the General one (because of the 7 day notice).

1 Like

Good to know. That’s probably it! Thank you for the information.

I’ll keep my eyes open for more if there are any.

Thanks,
Mariliam

1 Like

@mariliam
First and foremost, thank you for removing the auto-close setting, that’s great. Also, thanks for explaining and letting us know the details of this issue.:heart_eyes_cat:

Regarding the clutter with outdated posts that are no longer relevant, perhaps we in the community could help the moderators pinpoint such post? Similar to the function of flagging a post, one of the options could be to flag “outdated or irrelevant” posts. Once the Vikian flags the outdated post with this option, then the moderators could easily review and make the decision to close the discussion with the lock feature. This way the posts would be locked very specifically rather than a general 7-day timeframe.

Thanks for considering!

3 Likes

Thanks for taking a look.

Whenever a Viki staff has some time to reopen the Volunteering threads that were closed and remove the automatic closure on existing Volunteering threads from mid-March if that possible so people can continue to offer their help in volunteering.

The list of these threads is below (from mid-March: 13 topics with the notification of 7 days, including 8 topics closed after 7 days):

https://discussions.viki.com/c/volunteering/none

Thanks!

2 Likes

This is an excellent idea! I still need to check if the current settings of the forum tool support this. I will be working on it this week! :smile:

This is now done! :white_check_mark:
Thanks so much for sharing.

Mariliam

2 Likes

@mariliam

Thanks for taking a look! Plus during your weekend…

Just this one is missing, it wasn’t in the previous list:

And normally, it should be all!
Thanks again!

2 Likes

Done! :white_check_mark:

Mariliam

1 Like

@mariliam

Thank you a lot!
Don’t forget to relax and enjoy your weekend!!

2 Likes