Just wanted to give Nick, our resident Excel guru, a big shout out for helping us merge and purge thousands upon thousands of discussions over the 10+ year history of WSO. Below is a sneak peak into what he has been doing for the past 6 months. We have at least another year to go before we could ever call this "complete", but more on that below...
You may notice on some threads that there is sometimes a blue post outlined as "Related Topic"-- that is from this massive project to help make the WSO user experience better.
Ideally, when a user comes to WSO -- instead of searching and having 10 threads on one specific topic, we are making sure that relevant/related topics are Merged together so you don't have to jump around to so many threads to get all of the information / comments / opinions that are in the archives.
Ideally, those 10 threads become 2-3 beefier threads with more information on the specific topic, more insight into what users you should PM and less duplicate content.
Basically every week, we are now at a pace where ~1700-1900 threads are reviewed (based on organic traffic) and they are identified as "Master threads", "children threads" that should be merged into Masters and Reviewed but no action. On average out of those ~1,700-1,900 per week, we have about 200-300 master, 600-800 children and another 600-800 reviewed.
This all ties into more advanced moderation tools we'll be rolling out over the coming months. You may have noticed that the new Flagging system allows you to say if something is a duplicate, if it's spam, if it's low quality or in the wrong place. The goal is that going forward, different levels of moderators will have different powers to do various things. For example...a thread is in the wrong forum? Ok, great, where should it go (ideally that happens easily/quickly)....that is duplicate content? Ok, what thread should it be merged into or if there are no comments, redirected to?
This is similar to the model that Stack Overflow uses (which I think is genius) and will hopefully lead to a better WSO user experience as we roll them out.
Stay Tuned! Patrick
