Add time of last activity on an idea

Stew

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The life cycle of an idea includes the concept that one will be phased out eventually if there is no activity and no action is taken (idea cleanup). For example, we plan to manually phase out ideas after 6 months to a year if they are not implemented and no activity (no additional votes/comments, etc.) have taken place during that time frame.

It would be very helpful to either...
a.) Add a time of last activity to an idea for quick reference (i.e. - Last Activity: 6 months and 2 days ago). - OR -
b.) Build some sort of automatic phase out rules. In our use case, we plan on moving ideas that haven't been commented on in the last 6 months or so to an Idle category and then after that they will go to a "Last Chance" category. At the end of this cycle if there is no activity to make them active again they will be closed. All of this is manual and will probably require a fair amount of effort. If this process of phasing out ideas could be automated it could be a big time saver.

Notes: Moderator comments should not impact the time of last activity since you wouldn't want it to reset every time a moderator changed a category or added a moderator comment, etc.

Idea # 257Development, life cycle, time

Comments

vivek.bhaskaran 9 months ago

Why should'nt the moderator activity reset the last activity? If truly something is going on with the idea (internally) then should'nt the timestamp be affected?

OK - I am being selfish here - It'll be relatively easy to add the functionality for Last_Update_Timestamp on the idea (if we do NOT have to exclude moderator activity) ;)

Stew 9 months ago

I guess it depends. Does changing a category by a moderator impact the Last_Update_Timestamp? Does adding or editing a moderator comment update the Last_Update_Timestamp?

Here are two use cases:
1. If I moved the idea to the "Idle" category would it update the time stamp to today? If it would then that makes it look like it was moved to the "Idle" category for no reason to the next person to look at that time stamp.
2. If I add a moderator comment that says, "This idea was moved to Idle due to inactivity" and it updates the time stamp to today it makes me look like a liar...because there appears to have been activity.

There are really two separate concepts. Last activity by a regular user (anyone not a moderator). And Last activity on an idea. Both are valuable for different reasons.

I could live with just seeing the Last_Update_Timestamp on an idea even if it doesn't exclude moderator activity, however, I don't think that is a good long term fix but instead a temporary band aid with some areas of confusion. So maybe some automatic phase out rules would be better in the long run. I know, more work for you...but less work for all your users. ;-)

On the bright side, the fact that we can be this picky means you guys are doing a lot of things right. It is fun to discuss process improvements because that means the core is working well.

vivek.bhaskaran 8 months ago

Hey - we've done a "partial" implemntation here. If you hover over the # of Votes - it'll display the "Last Activity" --

We'll put together more documentation on how we define activity soon - nutshell -

Idea Creation, Revisions, Comments and Voting update the activity timestamp.

Stew 8 months ago

Excellent! That is very helpful! Thank you!

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