It would appear so.
The archives are just a category like any other. ‘Archiving’ (the Discourse feature) is analogous to closing or unlisting a topic.
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So in other words, we could retain the debate threads in the Assembly section while also taking advantage of freezing them in place via the archiving feature. Again, we would only do this for legislative history of enacted legislation. What would be the downsides associated with that approach?
The ‘characteristics’ of archiving topics are here.
It states that closed topics “Remain visible in all topic lists and search results”, this is never mentioned in the section for archived topics however. So I’m not entirely sure if this applies.
EDIT: I would assume not if it isn’t mentioned in the section.
I’ve given this some more thought and feel like closing threads really doesn’t do anything useful to preserve the debate. People can still edit or delete their posts. All it does is motivate people who have thoughts on the result of the vote to share them in places where they still can, fragmenting the legislative record. If people are posting irrelevant things after a vote, that has nothing to do with archiving legislative records, it’s literally just a spam problem no different from any other spam problem.
It’s also worth noting that Discourse keeps track of edit history and deleted posts can be restored by administrators or moderators.
In any case, I think this amendment is reasonable, though I don’t mind having a legislative requirement to preserve the debate and voting record.
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Alright, fair enough. I have come around to the full scope of proposal. And to continue the recent surge in legislative activity, I move it to a vote.
I’ll second it.
We are now at a vote!