When we set up this community we imported a bunch of posts from Stack Exchange. At the time, it seemed like many in the community wanted to migrate here. (This happened on some other communities too.) In practice, this has left us with a bunch of imported posts that were never claimed or improved -- they're just copies of posts from elsewhere. There's been some discussion in the past and it seemed like some people wanted to delete most of the imports and others wanted to keep them all.

A recent meta post made me think about all those old imports again. On another community, we eventually deleted imports following these criteria -- basically, posts that were imported but that nobody here had done anything with got deleted. In an answer on our recent meta post I wrote:

Arguments for [pruning old imports] include what you raised in the question, the effect on search-engine placement, and the "first impression" of a site full of old content. The main argument I can think of against doing it is that it didn't obviously work for Writing -- the community there is still small and pretty inactive, like here. But people (like you!) are here, and if we want to build up this community, we shouldn't let the outcome on Writing block us.

What say y'all?

In a comment, the OP suggested, instead of deleting them, marking them as "inactive" somehow. That answer is +5/-0 but there's been no other feedback. So I'm here to ask (at the top level) what, if anything, the members of this community would like to do with old untouched imports.

One option would be to delete them, as we did on Writing. Another option would be to move them "out of the way", so that visitors see only the questions that somebody here cares about in the Q&A category, and imports could be moved to an "archive" category where they are still available to search. Or we could just leave things as they are. Or maybe you have other ideas.

Thoughts?

posted 7 months ago

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Monica Cellio‭ staff

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