Tools to avoid inadvertent loss of discussion threads and metrics (EAv communities)

This is the 3rd time I inadvertly delete a discussion thread (in 2 months) at Phoenix's Nest.

Today, I asked Duleepa 'Dups' Wijayawardhana, CEO of Empire Avenue:
A) if it is possible to get the lost content back;
B) to create a tool for community-administrators in order to avoid inadvert loss of content.

My letter:

Thanks for checking if there is a back-up of group discussions.

A confirming message would be helpful to community administrators. 'Do you want to delete this discussion thread?' and click 'OK'. It is very frustrating for the members, when interesting conversations get lost. And I have to do a lot of apologies, which is really embarassing...

What was lost is a thread created this week. I don't remember the exact name of it. Something like 'Everybody give a hand. Phoenix's Nest lost it's second top position. Please invite your friends'.

It was one of the most interesting relevant conversations I've seen in Phoenix's Nest, about the current metrics measuring community activity and what metrics should be about. In this thread, we talked about what is community animation (a sort of job description of an online community manager), and we compared different styles of online community leadership. We also looked at the growth pattern of Phoenix's Nest.

The current second top community is lead by an 'anonymous' leader. We discussed what that represents for Empire Avenue.

We imagined what an ideal online community on Empire Avenue should be.

We decided to concentrate on what we do and let others do what they want. Fun and passion are more important to us, than being in a crisis mode (Adriel Hampton).

Then Chris Latko made a very positive comment about the new device for communities in the upper right menu. He said he had no idea there was so much richness in the content, and that this tool was helpful.

Focus on quality of content, quality of interactions, quality of networking, freshness of content and amount of teamwork / participation to group projects: we concluded that these should matter more than prestige and number of members in community metrics. It does not make much sense to measure a group by the whealth of the people standing in one room (prestige) and the number of members. What people do together is really what defines a community. The top best communities on Empire Avenue should be those with the best skills in online community management, production of content/discussions, and member participation. The current list of top communities and metrics do not reflect excellency of online community management and participation.

Chris Latko's comment gave me the idea this morning for the Phoenix's Nest Positive Attitude Award of the Year. These past months, there has been a lot of criticism and frustration. Members are invited to nominate people and explain why they have a positive attitude. What we will end up with is a list of various ways and attitudes adopted by users, that contribute to a winning networking strategy in social media. List of nominees will be published by press release in January 2011. Phoenix's Nest will start the New Year on a positive note.

Nothing ever happens for nothing. I did delete the thread inadvertly, which is unfortunate, but this gave me the opportunity to inform you about this discussion.

Thanks for checking if there is a possibility to get this thread back, and also evaluating the tasks of implementing a confirmation message before deletion of content for community-administrators, and how this could be inserted it into your work load.