Unanswered Question Archiving

[AndrewK]

Keeping our community experience streamlined and making information easy to find is important to the PTC Community Team!

Until 2016, the community team would lock forum threads that were no longer active, adding a note "This thread is inactive and closed by the PTC Community Management Team..." to explain the closure due to inactivity. While this is no longer our practice, it was the policy across all Creo forums at the time it was implemented.

Some of these locked threads remain unanswered and offer little impact as knowledge resources. Unfortunately, they still appear in search engine and community search results, which can clutter results and make it harder for users to find helpful answers.

To improve the quality of search results, we’ve decided to archive these posts. Once archived, they will no longer be visible to the community. However, they will still count toward members’ statistics for badges and ranks. This archiving will only affect Creo forum posts with no replies and will not include any product ideas or tips articles.

The activity will be completed on May 27th, 2025.

This effort is in addition to our existing 15-year archiving policy, which you can learn more about here.

[hheinze]

I do not like that step.

I found and find often good answers even if they are old.
In addition to that.. I just read it today.. and I have made many links to the old answers. I have to go now through all of them.. that is really bad.
And it is not THAT cluttered.. it was hard to find an answer, and in most cases, the answer was old (but helped!) and the answer of PTC (if it was a bug) was:
It's known, we don't solve it, live with that..

And there are for sure some people that work with old hardware and use wildfire, or an old Creo Version like 2 or 3 or 4..

What about you move it to an archive we can look into it?

BUT BIG P.S.:
If it really regards ONLY UNANSWERED POSTS, yes, you are welcome!

[Jaime_Lee]

Hi, @hheinze  

(and @StephaneG )

@AndrewK  just went and further updated his post.  I can assure you that with this exercise is REALLY   😊  just the Creo Posts that were "UNANSWERED."  The posts that had ANY Reply (helpful or not) and definitely the posts with marked solutions. weren't considered for this exercise.  So your links to "old answers" should not have been impacted.  

We appreciate your feedback.  

The Community Team has been getting feedback for awhile about making search better.  Having an archiving process is a common community industry "best practice" content maintenance process. 

The archived posts included in this exercise were about 2.6%  across all the CAD boards.

We just wanted to give the community a heads up that this was happening. 

Thank you for staying informed by subscribing to the Community Announcements board.

[Mat]

---

The Community Team has been getting feedback for awhile about making search better.  Having an archiving process is a common community industry "best practice" content maintenance process. 

---

If it is only about "making search better", maybe You should make searching better.

• trade search term as "AND" condition by default (at the moment it seems to be handled as "OR" condition)
  At least, I get many results, that do not include all search terms
• Ad filters to search conditions
  • "is Solved"
    (besides that little icon in the result list)
  • "number of answers"
    (beside the "Topics with no replies" checkbox)
  • "number of kudos"
    (besides the ability to sort list by kudos)
• let users save their searches (like in Windchill)

[AndrewK]

Hi @Mat 

Here are some search tips that might help with some of your requests.

• Not quite the "AND" condition you asked for but wrapping your search in quotes searches for an exact phrase.
• There is a solved check box on the search page.

• You can't filter by number of replies or kudos, but you can sort your result based on either.

• And you can't save your search but all your search parameters are part of the URL so you can bookmark it with your browser. For example:

https://community.ptc.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?filter=solvedThreads&q=%22Creo%20Parametric%20Installation%22&noSynonym=false&inactive=false&advanced=true&solved=true&sort_by=-topicKudosCount&collapse_discussion=true&search_type=thread

Unfortunately, our ability to customize the search experience is limited because the community platform is hosted by a vendor, however there are likely to be changes and improvements in the future. We are also concerned with external search engines which we have no direct control over beyond curating what is available to them through tools like archiving. 

You might also be interested in the federated search on eSupport if you aren't already familiar with it. PTC Knowledgebase Search | PTC Among other things, it includes results from the community and knowledge base.

[StephaneG]

Hello,
Fully agree with @hheinze , even old posts can provide very good solution.
Sometimes it's a mix of old an recent too.
It's better to have old solution that nothing, "It's known, we don't solve it, live with that" or "add in the idea box" but never treated.
An archived section could be a good solution.
Best regards

[Mat]

to conclude PTC's "strategy":

"We do not answer questions, we archive them."

And by the way, there are product ideas, that take 15+ years until some PTC employee graciously shows a reaction (mostly, "would not implement").

This is just another step to make PTC Community completely irrelevant.

[Jaime_Lee]

Hi, Mat,

Thank you for being a longtime member.  This exercise was initiated because we received feedback from other community members related to the "search" on the PTC Community.  Creo was specifically called out as an area that needed improvement.  Archiving "dated" community content is a pretty standard community content maintenance process amongst community managers in many industries.

The "Community Ideas" process has been evolving over time.  This post  community-ideas - PTC Community is a little dated, but maybe it explains a little bit about product management strategy that would interest you.

Community Ideas, in general, are always accessible to the members that post them even when they are flagged the "archived" status. 

You can read more about ideas archive process here.

Creo Community ideas were not part of this exercise.

[johrndorf]

Concernig the idea box, it is that good hidden tha 90% do never find it.

So entries of the PTC partners and the few customers tha post things there will very rarely be upvoted and therefore never implemented.

An idea box is a good thing you customers find it at an prominent place, and if the link is mentioned in the many, many newsletters.

It is a win-win thing for customers and PTC to make the products "great again" ...

[AndrewK]

Update:
We've corrected the date in the original post—it should be May 27th, not the previously stated date. We've also clarified which posts will be affected by this archiving to avoid any confusion. This activity will only affect posts with 0 replies and will not include product ideas. Thank you for your understanding!

[Chris3]

I agree with some of the other folks here. There is value in those 0 response posts. Usually that means that there isn't a solution. This is valuable information in of itself. If I see the same question I have and there are no responses then that saves me the time from asking the question again.

[TomU]

In my opinion, nothing should ever be deleted (and the URL shouldn't change!)  Feel free to provide all the filtering / searching capabilities you want, but never permanently hide anything from the rest of the community.  There is no good way to clean up stuff by some criteria (age, views, etc.) without also sweeping up valuable information that shouldn't be removed.  Please remember, the core of Creo hasn't really changed in the last 15 years (as much as marketing might claim).  Information that was valid then is often still valid today, and simply removing the information because it is "old" makes it that much harder to find good information.  People come and go, and there is a lot of really good information written by people many, many years ago that is still just as valuable today.  As @Chris3 mentioned, seeing a question go unanswered (hopefully) helps to keep someone from asking the same question again.

[olivierlp]

After some back and forth thinking about the feedback received here, we will not proceed with our initial intent. thanks all for chiming in.   

[LawrenceS]

Thank you for listening and discussing!  That should be encouraging to us all.

Sometimes people post questions that actually contain solutions of what they found that has been helpful to me in the past.

I hope you find other ways to improve the search without archiving or removing posts.

[hheinze]

A very bold move, thank you for that decision. This looks like a new era has begun!

[Werner_E]

---

@olivierlp wrote:

After some back and forth thinking about the feedback received here, we will not proceed with our initial intent. thanks all for chiming in.   

---

Does this apply just to the mentioned zero reply threads in the Creo subforum or does it (hopefully) also mean that PTC will stop archiving and thus hiding older threads in all subforums?

Sorry for the late reply but I don't frequent this subforum on a regular basis. I just come here when I experience any anomalies with the forum software like the current Khoros issues with attachments to see whether there is any current information on this (there isn't in this case).

I fully agree with @TomU  that hiding threads even though they may be old and even though it may be "a pretty standard community content maintenance process" should never be done!

I am active in the Mathcad subforum and this forum has undergone a whole series of migrations from one forum software to the next, and none of these migrations has ever taken place without painful losses. The clear structure of the forum was destroyed and could certainly not be restored by the new labels, and each time threads were irretrievably lost. links were not updated or attachments in older threads were simply deleted on a large scale. Many cross-references in older threads (if they are still there at all) now lead nowhere.
The deliberate and intentional hiding of older posts now reinforces and increases these negative effects, and I would very much like to see this stopped, because the option of having an archived thread briefly reactivated on request is not much help in my opinion.

EDIT: Just found this post of @AndrewK  making clear that PTC stops archiving for the next three years and will reassess their policy. It is hoped that the discussions will converge on no longer archiving threads and perhaps even permanently unarchiving threads that have already been archived. As @hheinze  already indicated, we are not used that PTC is actually listening and reacting, but this paradigm shift is definitely something we greatly appreciate. Thank you to the community team!

[AndrewK]

Yes, no solid decision has been made, but we may look into something in between so older content is not indexed by Google or incorrectly referenced by Gen AI but is still visible in the community.

[Werner_E]

---

@AndrewK wrote:

Yes, no solid decision has been made, but we may look into something in between so older content is not indexed by Google or incorrectly referenced by Gen AI but is still visible in the community.

---

Thanks! Glad to hear that!

[hheinze]

I assume the AI is so intelligent to include the age and the program version when doing its algorythm.

We as human beings want it to stay because we can make use of the information. Just to help this KI-Hype to blow away our minds is a wrong decision.

It happens often that the KI is not saying: "I dont know" but tells you in a long sentence stuff you already know and answers no question but it only takes time reading that "pirated" information.

I just make a quick search and (as long as this link will be active) this is an interesting read LINK.

Besides that, I never understood why "necro" threads are bad. I used to write in old threads if there is no new one. A old thread is not making that thread a bad thread.

[AndrewK]

---

@hheinze wrote:

I assume the AI is so intelligent to include the age and the program version when doing its algorithm.

---

You would think so 😀 but I recently had an experience where a Google search AI summary was referencing an article from 2009 which was completely wrong and very misleading.

---

@hheinze wrote:

Just to help this KI-Hype to blow away our minds is a wrong decision.

It happens often that the KI is not saying: "I don't know" but tells you in a long sentence stuff you already know and answers no question, but it only takes time reading that "pirated" information.

---

I agree but since so many are increasingly reliant on AI, we want to make sure they are getting the correct information, and we also want to make sure traditional search is surfacing the most up to date results. Don't worry though, we are a community of humans and that is our first concern which is why we paused the archiving to reassess.