Coming Soon - Archiving and Non-destructive Deletion
Something that users have asked for here and there is the ability to archive people… people who they don’t want to necessarily delete forever for historical purposes or the occasional lookup, but would rather not appear in their main people listing. For example, people who have moved to different cities or churches, are away at school, or are deceased. People have been working around this with tagging and smart groups, creating rules such as “people who are not tagged with inactive” or “people who are not tagged with out of town.” While this works just fine, it’s still a workaround that is an extra step, and it still leaves all these people in the main listing, in search results, and count against your quota.
So I’ve been thinking about this problem and it got me thinking about other things, mainly how deleting people from your account can be a somewhat stressful act. When you go to delete a person, there’s always that slight hesitation… up till now I’ve tried to make it a bit less jarring by making sure a confirmation comes up that lets you back out of the deletion, but once you click “ok” that person is gone forever. That’s so… permanent.
So I’ve been working on a revamped system for handling the management of people. Soon, the existing confirmation will be replaced with one that will let you choose to either delete, archive or cancel.
Clicking the delete and archive buttons will do just that - delete or archive the person. Cancel will of course close the dialog with no effect. Here’s where things get interesting… clicking either the delete or archive buttons will do its thing, but then present a new Restore button.
Clicking that button will do just that - restore the person back into your main database. You’ll be able to view all the people who you’ve archived, as well as those who have been deleted so you can always restore them back to the main listing, but they won’t show up in your main listings and smart groups. Much more peace of mind.
There are still some details to work through with this new functionality, but it’s progressing very well, and hopefully it’ll be able to go live soon!
1 year ago