Archived Ideas

[STEVEG]

I have a couple questions about ideas that are archived.  Does the person that created the idea get notified?  Does anyone that either comments on it or vote for it get notified?

I happened to be on this forum yesterday when @olivierlp was archiving quite a few ideas and it notified me in the browser.  However, I did not get any emails.  I just might not have voted or commented on any of the ideas that were archived but that got me thinking about my questions.

I was looking back at my emails I received and see I got emails for ideas I did not vote for and did not comment on.  Just wanted to know how the notifications work on archived ideas.

[BenLoosli]

I got a bunch of email notifications that ideas had been archived yesterday.

If the person is no longer active in the community, I doubt they get any notification.

To me, an idea being archived says that PTC will not consider that idea and it is basically discarded.

[TomU]

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@BenLoosli wrote:

To me, an idea being archived says that PTC will not consider that idea and it is basically discarded.

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It's the community admins doing the archiving, not the actual product managers responsible for that area of the software.  I would feel much better if the product managers were the ones doing the archiving.  Frankly it seems inconsistent to use low votes as justification to archive an idea, but even the highest voted ideas are rarely implemented, and often discarded just as easily with 'no plans to implement'.

All the work is left to the community to create the ideas and generate votes, with zero promise of implementation, regardless of how many votes an idea receives.  There needs to be more commitment from upper level management to actually implement the highest voted ideas, and do so in a reasonable amount of time.  (Couple of years at most.)

[AndrewK]

We turn off notifications when doing this so people subscribed to the board don't get spammed with tons of email notifications. When moving or editing a post there is a way to notify just the author or just members that have replied to the post. Unfortunately, there is no way to do that in this case. It is all or nothing.

Yesterday when we started this process, I forgot to turn off notifications for the first 7 ideas we archived, so those are probably the ones you received notifications for. Hopefully you only received notifications for those 7.

[TomU]

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@AndrewK wrote:

We turn off notifications when doing this so people subscribed to the board don't get spammed with tons of email notifications. When moving or editing a post there is a way to notify just the author or just members that have replied to the post. Unfortunately, there is no way to do that in this case. It is all or nothing.

Yesterday when we started this process, I forgot to turn off notifications for the first 7 ideas we archived, so those are probably the ones you received notifications for. Hopefully you only received notifications for those 7.

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This seems like a problem.  One of my ideas was archived.  Fortunately it was one of the first 7 or I would never have known.  Not notifying people doesn't seem like an acceptable solution.  At a minimum the creator of the idea and probably all the people who voted for it should be notified anytime the status changes, including being archived.

[Marco_Tosin]

I fully agree with Tom.

[AndrewK · Accepted solution]

This isn't a perfect solution, but maybe a temporary one while we look into other notification options. If you want to check if any of your ideas were archived there are a couple of ways you can download a CSV and filter on the relevant information. We archive every quarter.

One way would be to use the search. You should all be able to download search results to CSV.

Then you can filter the results. Searching based on author will also return ideas you commented on so you will need to further filter your CSV by author and status.

Another option would be to use the Idea Filter and Sort page. For those of you that haven't seen this it is something used by the product managers that we also gave Champions access to. It can be slow because it relies on the API to retrieve sometimes thousands of results at once, but it gives us a lot of flexibility. To visit this page, go to the Idea board and scroll down. You should see an Idea Filter and Sort Page button on the side of the page.

Then you can filter on the "Archived" status and export a CSV.

Then you can filter the results by author.

And maybe before the next round of archiving we can work out a way to notify just the interested parties (author, voters, etc.) without spamming everyone subscribed to a board.

[STEVEG]

That is handy @AndrewK 

Can the "Status" of an idea be added to the filtering before exporting?

[AndrewK]

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@STEVEG wrote:

That is handy @AndrewK 

Can the "Status" of an idea be added to the filtering before exporting?

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Not from the search page, but it can on the "Filter and Sort" page.

[STEVEG]

I actually received no email notifications about archived ideas.  It was only while I was on this community site that I was notified within my browser.

But I am still interested in knowing if the creator of the idea is notified by email if their idea is archived.