Automated Hygiene lets community admins and moderators automatically archive,lock, or delete inactive discussion threads across a community, instead of cleaning up thousands of old posts by hand.

Before you start

Before you set up Automated Hygiene, make sure you have the following:

• Permission — You need moderation permissions that include managing Automated Hygiene. This is separate from your regular moderation queue permissions.
• Location — You'll find it under Moderation sidebar → Automated Hygiene.

About Automated Hygiene

Large communities build up thousands of old, inactive discussion threads over time. Cleaning these up one by one isn't realistic. Automated Hygiene runs on a schedule and automatically applies an action you choose — archive, lock, or delete — to threads that have gone quiet for longer than a time period you set. It's designed to work safely at scale, with a preview of what will be affected before anything happens, a short window to cancel, protection against common mistakes, and a full history of what ran and when.

Key concepts

Keep the following in mind as you set up Automated Hygiene:

• Inactivity — Measured by the last reply or update to a thread. Likes and reactions don't count, so a thread that only got a reaction but no new replies is still considered stale.
• Actions apply to the whole thread — Archiving affects the original post and every reply underneath it. Deleting removes the whole thread. Locking closes the entire thread to new replies.
• Protected threads — Pinned, featured, sticky, and announcement threads are never touched, no matter how long they've been inactive.
• Attribution — Actions taken by Automated Hygiene show up in your audit trail as automatic actions, not as actions taken by a specific person.

Available actions

Create a rule

A rule tells Automated Hygiene which threads to act on, how long they need to be inactive, and what to do with them. To create a rule:

1. Go to Moderation sidebar → Automated Hygiene.
2. Choose the categories or boards the rule should apply to.

A category can only belong to one active rule at a time, so you won't be able to pick a category that's already covered by another rule.

3. Set the inactivity threshold, in days. Threads without a new reply in longer than this become eligible for the action. The minimum is 1 day.
4. Choose an action: Archive, Lock, or Delete.
5. Decide whether to notify thread starters when their thread is affected. This is off by default, so a large cleanup doesn't send a wave of notifications. Turn it on if you want people notified.
6. Select Preview impact to see roughly how many threads the rule would affect.
7. Save the rule.

You can create more than one rule. For example, one rule could archive a category after 90 days of inactivity, while another deletes a different category after 30 days.

Saving or editing a rule doesn't take effect immediately - see "Safety features" below.

Safety features that protect your community

Because these actions affect threads at scale, Automated Hygiene includes several safeguards:

• Delay and cancel window — Saving or editing a rule schedules it to run about 5 minutes later. During that window, a banner lets you edit or cancel the run. Turning off a rule also cancels any run that was about to happen.
• Impact preview — See how many threads a rule would affect before you commit to it.
• Manual override protection — If you manually reverse an automatic action — for example, unlocking a thread that Automated Hygiene locked — the rule won't reapply that action to the same thread again. Your manual change sticks.
• Protected threads — Pinned, featured, sticky, and announcement threads are always skipped.
• No repeat actions — A thread already in the target state, for example already archived or already locked, is skipped on future runs.

There's currently no one-click way to undo a run once it's finished. Review the impact preview carefully before saving a rule.

What happens when a rule runs

Rules run automatically once a day, plus once about 5 minutes after you save or edit them. Each time a rule runs, it:

• Finds threads that are stale, in scope, and not protected or manually overridden.
• Applies the chosen action in batches.
• Adds an entry to the run history for the audit trail.
• Notifies thread starters, if that setting is turned on.

View run history and export affected threads

The Run history tab shows every past run, so you can see exactly what happened and when.

Export the affected URLs

Because a single run can affect a large number of threads, exports are built in the background rather than directly in your browser. To export the list of threads a run affected:

1. Select Export next to the run.
2. You'll see a message that the export has started.
3. Once it's ready, you'll receive an email with a secure, time-limited link to download a CSV of the affected thread URLs.

The Export button disables itself while your request is processing, so clicking it twice won't create duplicate exports.

Known limitations

The 5-minute delay lets you cancel a run before it starts, but there's no built-in way to undo a run after it's completed. Reversing a finished run isn't currently supported, though it may be added in the future.

Related info

If you don't see Automated Hygiene in your moderation sidebar, or a rule you created isn't running, contact your Bevy team to confirm the feature is turned on for your community.