Marking Older Community Posts As Answered

[Dan Breyen]

Does anyone know if there is an Atlassian process where someone is reviewing old posts that aren't marked as 'Answered' where they appear to be resolved, or the person who asked the question hasn't gone back and marked it as answered?

It seems there are plenty of posts that are in this state.  It makes it challenging when you're trying to answer questions that are already answered, but aren't marked as such.  Does someone go through old posts and 'clean them up'?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, but it's not done a lot.

Community leaders can (un)accept answers and we do sometimes try to look at old open questions with a view to getting them an answer.  We do have a channel for talking about answering old questions, plus an easy way to filter.  But we tend to be looking at new posts rather than old.

[Dan Breyen]

Thanks @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- it seems to me there are a lot of older issues that have been answered but not marked as such.  When looking as 'unanswered' questions, they show up in the list since they weren't marked as such.  It might be helpful to mark some of these as 'answered' questions so they are cleared out of the 'unanswered' list. 

It would help to clear out the 'backlog' of unanswered questions.  

Just my 2 cents.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Indeed, there are a lot.

Many are inherited from the older systems, but I think they've been overtaken by newer posts.

I have a rather cynical thought about how a good percentage of them ended up like this, both old and new, but that's not what we're talking about here.

There's a lot of housekeeping to be done, and people are on it, but old questions are low on the list of things to keep on top of!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Mmm, since that last answer, I'm started to get comments on old questions asking people to close them.

Whilst I too would love them to be closed off, this is not the way to do it.

The community asks people not to necropost, because it looks like spam.  I'm not going to look at marking an answer right on something I lost interest in 6 years ago, and the other people involved can't, so they're even less interested.

The Community Advisory Board are looking at a lot of other ways to housekeep and curate the older stuff, but it discarded "prompt to close" in the very first discussion.  We've also got a newer version of the Community software on the way, and that has some more housekeeping tools that will make it easier for mods, leads and standard users to do it.