Forum topics to address key issues

[abhansnuk]

• the identified issues
• ideas for usage
• noindex of posts locked for moderation only

Data shared by Jono in Marketing Slack, 2022/1/4, 11:16 UTC
https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C0GKJ7TFA/p1641294988006500
Subsequent discussion follows this timeline.

[abhansnuk]

2022/1/4: Summary of discussion on locked topics

• check whether locked topics are noindexed. May need some custom logic for such scenario-related topics.
• clarify difference between 'locked' and 'closed' (and we also noindex 'stale' with some cutoff, maybe 3 years?). Some further digging needed to understand how the logic works and what changes it may need.
• check if topics locked manually get noindexed, but those that are locked (like your last example) due to their age, are not noindexed. Some examples of an old topic is indexed, and a relevant topic from the latest WP release from 10 months ago with troubleshooting steps noindexed
• some discussion in the middle of last year on allowing indexing topics which had been locked to enable clear answers and step by step resolutions to be provided. There was some discussion relating to the example of changes in jquery from the releases. It also came up with when we were marketing the release to meetups and the Questions and Answers, and in the testing of the presentations. There was feedback on needing to have important support answers to be found more easily in search.

[abhansnuk]

Summary of suggestion by Jono Alderson: More aggressively merge, close and/or noindex 'bad' support/forum posts (which doesn't sit well with our current governance models or moderator preferences).

• Collieth supported this aspect if there was a process in place to ensure it only happens for major catch-all scenarios. More on Slack
• Collieth and Abha highlighted what has worked well previously: collecting the good information in a forum topic that was locked and only editable by moderators, and closing relevant topics and linking to the central information source. This allows for the topic to be un-stickied later on to avoid unwarranted concern, with the information still relevant as possible and discoverable via search. Potential user-focused starting point solution. Subsequent discussion on indexing of such support topics as in the comment above.
• Jono: it would be helpful for support teams to close - and thus, noindex - those threads (which they have the ability to do); but not until we have something definitive to rank in their place. Otherwise we'll just surface more of the same.

[abhansnuk]

Example of high ranking support searches shared by Jono 2022/01/04
"https://wordpress.org/support/topic/my-account-login/ got 17k clicks in December (2021)
Another 8k here for 'login' type queries... https://wordpress.org/support/topic/login-to-wp-admin-3/
So, ~30k+ easily people trying to work out how to log in to their site(s), and ending up on dead-end threads."