15

It's come to my attention that we have this tag, , for questions about the Ubuntu One client for Windows.

As far as I can tell, these questions are obsolete because the Ubuntu One files service, which is what the Windows client was for, has been discontinued.

Many of these questions are were unanswered, before I made this post, for example:

All of these have now been closed by the community, so I guess there is general agreement with my suggestion that they should be closed.

Others are answered but still seem rather pointless now, for example:

In my opinion, all of these unanswered questions should be closed and the tag should be blacklisted as it will not be useful in the future and is currently being occasionally misused for questions about

What should we do with this tag and the remaining closed/answered questions?

3 Answers 3

6

I agree with you that Ubuntu One is long discontinued and there is no way we can provide answers to the questions that remain unanswered. Closing the questions is not going to hurt anyone I suppose.

But blacklisting the tag will make editing the questions in the future tricky. Perhaps, in addition to or instead of blacklisting the tag, we should consider deleting the questions because there is no value in them anymore.

14
  • 1
    I agree - in my opinion the questions are not useful at all to anyone now even if they are answered! Deleting them would declutter search results etc so I think it would improve the site.
    – Zanna Mod
    Dec 23, 2016 at 16:23
  • 8
    What would happen to the rewards (points, badges) people earned with those questions and answers? Would they be preserved or reverted as well when old posts are deleted?
    – Byte Commander Mod
    Dec 23, 2016 at 16:51
  • I agree with deleting provided the rewards stay.
    – user589808
    Dec 23, 2016 at 18:46
  • 4
    @CelticWarrior AFAIK it's like this: badges are never taken away once earned. If a post has 3 or more upvotes and has been on the site for at least 60 days, then reputation is not lost when it is deleted. Otherwise, reputation is lost.
    – Zanna Mod
    Dec 23, 2016 at 19:48
  • 2
    Close all. Delete those that can't be useful.
    – Anwar
    Dec 26, 2016 at 12:59
  • Hmm so far there seems to be little objection to deleting them. To play devil's advocate, here is the highest voted question: What command-line options are available for Ubuntu One? and the second-highest How to prevent Ubuntu One for Windows from automatically signing on to my account? is there any justification for keeping these good quality questions and their answers? If so, should we decide on some criteria for which questions to delete? I have voted to delete some closed ones - what next?
    – Zanna Mod
    Dec 26, 2016 at 21:15
  • 4
    Don't just delete them... they will be useful for someone at some point.
    – don.joey
    Dec 27, 2016 at 15:19
  • 3
    @don.joey The Ubuntu One Files service is discontinued, so nobody can use it even if they want to. How can these questions help anyone?
    – Zanna Mod
    Dec 27, 2016 at 17:19
  • 3
    @Zanna Yeah I agree these questions are no longer useful. However, there is some value in archiving posts that used to be useful, so perhaps we should not delete all questions about Ubuntu One. I am unsure what criteria to use for deciding what questions not to delete though.
    – edwinksl
    Dec 28, 2016 at 20:07
  • 1
    @edwinksl I think we agree on the value of these posts - they could be considered to have a social history value, right? From that perspective, being sensible (not saying "let's just preserve everything possible for future historians", because that is not the aim of AU, and keeping otherwise useless questions around reduces the usefulness of the site to those search for help with Ubuntu issues imho, by cluttering search), maybe we could choose a few high quality ones with good answers and relatively many votes and views that seem to represent the issues relating to it?
    – Zanna Mod
    Dec 28, 2016 at 20:24
  • 1
  • 2
    As a general remark (not just for ubuntu one), the issues people were having with a piece of software are valuable data that is worth keeping. Also these questions do not hurt our site; they can simply stay dormant. Third, the community might decide to relaunch Ubuntu One at one point. Finally, why should we invest our efforts in cleaning questions which are answered but just no longer relevant?
    – don.joey
    Dec 30, 2016 at 9:35
  • @don.joey thank you very much for explaining your comment. I responded in my answer
    – Zanna Mod
    Dec 30, 2016 at 22:26
  • I turned my comment into an answer
    – don.joey
    Jan 4, 2017 at 15:27
0

Don't focus on questions/answers about Ubuntu One

  1. As a general remark (not just for ubuntu one), the issues people were having with a piece of software are valuable data that is worth keeping.

  2. Also these questions do not hurt our site; they can simply stay dormant.

  3. Third, the community might decide to relaunch Ubuntu One at one point.

  4. Finally, why should we invest our efforts in cleaning questions which are answered but just no longer relevant?

-1

So far, most of the questions, even the answered ones, have been closed (I originally voted to close only unanswered ones). There are about 40 questions remaining with this tag (and I have found many more questions tagged that are similarly obsolete and begun closing the unanswered ones). jokerdino suggested we might consider deleting these questions and this provoked some thoughtful discussion:

What would happen to the rewards (points, badges) people earned with those questions and answers? Would they be preserved or reverted as well when old posts are deleted?

I believe the answer to this is that if a post has 3 or more upvotes and has been on the site for at least 60 days, then reputation is not lost when it is deleted. Otherwise, reputation is lost. Someone else said:

I agree with deleting provided the rewards stay.

This could lead to the conclusion that we should delete questions where either:

  • nobody got any upvotes
  • everyone got more than 3 upvotes
  • anyone who got upvotes has vanished from the site

However, others thought that we should not delete questions because they have some value even though they are not directly useful for the intended purpose:

As a general remark (not just for Ubuntu One), the issues people were having with a piece of software are valuable data that is worth keeping.

and

I agree these questions are no longer useful. However, there is some value in archiving posts that used to be useful, so perhaps we should not delete all questions about Ubuntu One. I am unsure what criteria to use for deciding what questions not to delete though.

Trying to take these objections as seriously as possible, I considered what value these posts could have (both because I need to have a reason for my actions and because I want to consider what in general should happen to questions that are obsolete) and I can see:

  1. A social history value (any historians reading care to comment?)
  2. A value to developers (do devs agree with this?)

My opinion based on this is that we should delete those questions that are low quality or very similar to better questions, and preserve the ones that best represent the issues people had with the software. Here are some questions I'd consider worth preserving:

Maybe there are a few others that could be useful to devs/future historians.

Further arguments in favour of preservation were:

Also these questions do not hurt our site; they can simply stay dormant.

I would argue that these questions are potentially useless results in search - the site would be more useful for its intended purpose without them

Third, the community might decide to relaunch Ubuntu One at one point.

If that happens, some of the high quality questions about the working of the service could possibly be useful. However, most of these old questions would probably be more confusing than useful, since presumably any old bugs would have been squashed and other things would have changed. If people had issues with the service, they could ask new questions about them.

Finally, why should we invest our efforts in cleaning questions which are answered but just no longer relevant?

To this I say, if it makes the site more useful, I am willing to invest my efforts and I know others will help, that is not a problem.

TL:DR

I think we should delete (at least) the questions that

  • are similar to better questions
  • are unclear or otherwise low quality
  • won't cause reputation to be lost by active users if they are deleted

Please comment if you have an opinion on this!

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .