How to unclutter and organize?

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for all the great questions and thoughts. A lot of your pain points are going to be addressed with upcoming changes in the works. I will do my best to respond to each of your items, though.

A.) Right -- merge is coming. We are all very excited. :)

B.) Have you played around with the management view and it's various filters? With your premium package, you have access to the full-featured version of it. It may be able to do some of what you want already. If it doesn't, we'd love to hear what kind of filters / sorts would be most useful to you. (Perhaps start an "idea" topic with your requests?)

C.) I'd recommend keeping praise topics as separate posts. Then add a Live Topic Widget to your site (home page, perhaps?) based on the topic type "praise". Instant unsolicited testimonials.

D.) Yes, that use case is exactly what our "bury" feature is for. Burying doesn't send a notification to the topic author while Removing does so it's a better choice for dealing with content that is just not relevant anymore rather than inappropriate. You can use the "bury" feature with your topic moderation tools.

Be as liberal as necessary with the "redirect" option -- particularly while we're waiting for merge. I guess just watch out for nuances that might make it a different issue than the one you're redirecting to. Customers can get annoyed if they feel their topic isn't the same as the one you're pointing to. When you do redirect, be sure you let the customer know you're doing it because the other topic has the canonical response or because you want to aggregate "votes" in one place, etc.

Be careful with "remove". The topic author is sent a notification. Other customers can see that you've removed it. If you've removed something just because it was critical, you might be adding fuel to the fire. Better to address it head on and try to re-frame the conversation. That being said, if a customer is being abusive and using foul language, go ahead and remove it. If they're doing that, but they do have a point hidden amidst the vitriol, invite them to restate their point without the abuse and/or cursing. Spam and crass commercialism should get no mercy. :)

Clutter.... yes, that's a good one. And one that will be addressed with upcoming changes. So hang tight!

Yola, Songbird & Chi.mp are some communities that I think are great examples. They have designated their most helpful community members as "Champions"; they have thriving communities with a lot of passion and positive interaction; they don't unnecessarily censor customers (iow, they use their moderation tools with care).

Also, if you missed my community webcast series, you can check them out at http://getsatisfaction.tv and you can see the slide decks for the first three at http://slideshare.net/getsatisfaction. The fourth webcast was actually an interview with Yola's Customer Support Manager and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for tips for both fostering a successful customer community and for getting the most out of GS.

Hope that helps!