Over its lifetime, your community will accumulate a lot of content in the form of discussions, blogs, and other user-created content. Not all of this content will remain relevant forever, so...what do you do with it? You don't want to delete it, but you also don't want it "muddying" search results, which makes it difficult for users to find the more relevant and recent information.

You can archive old and outdated discussions, questions & answers, and blogs to "take them out of circulation."

NOTE: Archiving is not deleting; the content is still in your community site and can still be accessed by Super Admins. When content is archived as described in this article, it is no longer publicly available, so it's not surfacing in searches.

Higher Logic's two-step best practice for archiving content is to:

1. Create a "hidden" community that will be used exclusively for housing your account's old and outdated content.
2. Move discussions, questions-&-answers, and blogs into the "hidden" community so they're no longer accessible in their original community.

NOTE: If you have several communities with content that you want to archive but you want to keep each community's content separate from the others, you can create multiple hidden communities. If you decide on this option, consider creating an "archive" Community Type as described in Hidden Community Type, below.

Create a hidden community

Creating a hidden community is no different than creating any other community; the Join and View Permissions are what makes a community hidden.

To create a hidden community:

1. Access the Admin interface.
2. Navigate to Community > Communities > List.

3. Click the plus symbol to the right of the page title to create a community.
4. Give the community a unique name and complete any other settings.

TIP: This community is going to contain archived content, so consider including Archive and the name of the source community in the title.

5. Set the Join and View Permissions to Invitation Only. This effectively "hides" the community.

6. Scroll down and click Save, and then verify that the new community is in the Communities list.

NOTE: Repeat these steps if you have other communities with content that you want to archive separately.

Archive-specific Community Type

If you have several communities with content that you want to archive and you want the archiving for those communities' content to be in separate hidden communities, you could create an "archive" Community Type.

See Community Types to learn how to create a Community Type, but below are a few tips.

• Qualify the Community Type name with "hidden" or "archive" so that its purpose is obvious.
• Consider populating the Description and Text to show when Creating a New Community of this Type fields with info about the Community Type's purpose being to archive content.
• Set the Join and View Permissions to Invitation Only.
• Disable any unnecessary Features and Permissions.

Now, when you create hidden communities for your archived content, base them on this Community Type and they'll automatically inherit the Join and View Permissions as well as any other default settings.

Archiving criteria

Next, you have to determine the criteria for what content you're going to archive. This will be unique to each organization and could be based on, for example, date (e.g., archive all content created before MM/DD/YY), age (e.g., archive all content older than x years), a retired feature/aspect/practice (e.g., archive all content pertaining to door-to-door membership drives).

After you've decided on your archive criteria, you can set about archiving the threads and blogs that match that criteria.

Archive threads

Threads are, collectively, discussion posts and questions and their answers.

• In order to archive threads, you'll have to have created a hidden, archive community, as described above in Create a hidden community.

To archive threads:

1. Access the Admin interface.
2. Navigate to Community > Discussions > Move Thread.

3. On the Move Discussion Threads page:

4. In section 1, leave the default to search by Discussion or select Date if you want to search on a date range (a Select a date range field appears in section 2).

5. In section 2:

• Click the Community dropdown and choose a source community.
• Click the Thread(s) dropdown and select the threads that you want to archive.
• Click the calendar icons to specify a date range (if searching by date).

6. In section 3, click the Community dropdown and choose the destination community that will house your archived content.

7. Click Move.

A message displays and confirms the move.

Archive blogs

You can easily archive entire blogs to prevent them displaying.

• In order to archive a blog, you'll have to have created a hidden, archive community, as described above in Create a hidden community.
• You can archive entire blogs only; you cannot archive individual blog articles.
• You can archive blogs individually; you cannot simultaneously archive several blogs.

To archive a blog:

1. Navigate to the blog that you want to archive and select Edit.
2. Scroll down and from the Associate this post with a community dropdown, choose the hidden community that you created.
3. Choose Selected Community from the Who can read your blog entry? dropdown. You're selecting the community that you set in the previous step.

4. Click Save.

By setting this up, you've essentially made the entire blog visible to only that community and its members, all of whom should be Super Admins.

TIP: To reverse this, simply revisit the blog, associate it with the original community, and update the visibility setting (steps 2 and 3 above).