Auto move posts to another forum after cut off date

[Davyc]

It would be great to have an option to move topics from one forum to another after a cut off date - for example you may have a news related forum and after so many days news topics could be moved to a news archive forum, thus keeping the current news relevant and vibrant.  I know that posts can be moved manually, but having an auto mode would significantly relieve the burden especially if there are hundreds of posts being made each week.  I understand that not everyone would want such a feature, but it's uses can be expanded into many areas, especially something like a support forum.

Thoughts and comments appreciated so I don't feel like I'm just blowing air around the room lol.

[Millipede]

I too have a “News” forum on my support forum, where I use the RSS feeds feature to pull in articles from other sites.

My forum (now 14 years old) is very much quieter than it used to be, as I guess many users moved to one or more of the many Facebook Groups for the same condition. In the past, I used to use a plugin to delete news topics older than X days (eg, 3, 4, 6 months). As similar plugins for IPS 4 are no longer available (although they still exist), I’ve now got a “News” forum with 100s of topics, and before long it will end up with as many topics as my main forum has. It also means that the “All Activity” feed is flooded with these news items

Ideally, I’d prefer to be able to use Pages to do the same thing by pulling in articles via RSS feeds (with the images from the articles, same as it does in forums), particularly as the items are originally articles and not discussion topics per se. If it were in a Pages database, it then wouldn’t start dwarfing the other forums when it comes to the number of topics in each forum. It too, though, wouldn’t stop “All Activity” being flooded with these. But doing it in Pages is not possible, at least not that I'd know how (I tried the one app that’s supposed to do this, but it didn’t work for me).

So, yes, I’d tend to agree with your suggestion, especially as some news items can become out of date.

[Joel R]

@Davyc have you evaluated the built-in archive feature for forums?

[Davyc]

10 hours ago, Joel R said:

have you evaluated the built-in archive feature for forums?

No, due to lack of specific information as to how the archive feature works I assumed that it was a generalisation rather then specific orientated, but I will take a closer look and see if it can do what I would like it to do.  Thanks for pointing this out and I'll provide some feedback as to whether it fits my needs or not.

[Millipede]

Info about archiving is here:

The following may or may not be important to you (italics are mine for emphasis):

Quote

Archived topics cannot be posted in or edited, and will not show in search results.

Personally, I find that topics not showing in search results is a bit of a no-no... Also, if you want people to reply, even if at a much later date than that of the news topic, they won't be able to.

[Davyc]

@Millipede Thanks for digging that out for me.  It's not ideal by any means.  Whilst it will archive it doesn't actually allow you to move topics to another forum, at least not from what I can view in the instructions given.  I really want the topics moved but still accessible for searching and people who may wish to respond.  Ahh well, back to manual moving lol.

[Millipede]

@Davyc Archiving seems (to me, at least) to be more of a "grave yard" sort of thing... I didn't think it would be suitable for your needs. What you (maybe me too) are looking for is something that can automate moving topics that are older than X days from a particular forum to another forum. I've no idea if this add-on (or its full version) might help?

Then there's the matter of if it'll be compatible with v.4.4...

[Davyc]

I think maybe this one would be more like it, but I would have to send a PM to the author to ask and it's not (yet) 4.4 compatible, unless it doesn't make any difference, just what it says in the marketplace.