Cleaning up your UserVoice Forums

Keeping a clean, healthy forum is important to maintain a manageable sized backlog of feedback and consistent communication with stakeholders. Sometimes you have a lot of ideas and need to spend time reviewing and cleaning up your forums.

Start With Low Hanging Fruit

There are several options to initially clean up your forum quickly with the use of filters, sorting and bulk actions.

Filter ideas and archive stale ones

Bulk move ideas that haven't had customer activity into a private forum that your users won't have access to. This way, you have easy access to the data contained in these ideas if you wish to revisit them sometime in the future.

• Create a new private forum on your account. Article with more information.

• Verify your filtered date is for All time 

• Under the filter "Inactivity", filter ideas by Inactivity during a specific time range.

• Bulk select all of these ideas and move them to the private forum you created.

Likewise, you could choose different filter options (i.e., customer activity in the last 90 days), or choose to delete the ideas. What you choose depends on your needs, but all deleted ideas can be found and bulk restored in UserVoice using the status filter.

Sort ideas, select and perform bulk actions

You can sort your ideas (either all of them or within a given filter - such as all ideas with a "Declined" status) and then select them individually. Once you have selected all of the desired ideas, you can perform a bulk action.

For example, you could sort your ideas with those with the least number supporting users at the top, and select individual ideas to move, delete, etc. This makes it easier to quickly comb through and select just the ideas you want.

• Enable the "Voters" column in the feedback grid

• Click on the column header to sort by Voters, ascending

• You will then have to click to check the box next to each idea individually (so as to not select all the ideas in the filter)

• With the ideas selected, you can perform bulk actions, such as moving to another forum or deleting.

Pro Tip: Don't try to select all the ideas in one go, do smaller chunks (one page at a time).

Using Labels for More In-depth Triage

You can use labels to tag ideas that need a status update, need further review, or need to be merged. When ideas have labels applied, this will allow you to pull all of those ideas up at once to perform bulk actions.

More information about using labels can be found here, and here are some example uses that can help you while you clean up your forum.

Needs status update

You can use a label to mark ideas that have already been implemented or decided not to be worked on. Then, you can pull up all of these ideas at once with this label and update their statuses. You can pull up all ideas with a particular label by using this filtering option:

More information about updating statuses and how users are notified can be found here.

Merge

As you clean up your forum, you may start to notice duplicate ideas. You can make note of the master idea to be merged in to, and mark others with labels so they can be pulled up and merged in bulk.

More information about merging ideas can be found here.

Needs further review

You can use a label to mark ideas that need to be further reviewed by internal teams. You can pull up all of these ideas at once with this label to share with those who have access to UserVoice.