Remove Pages From a Discussion

[MikeBrinkman]

An instructor has a message board for students to post messages to find subs for their computer lab hours if they are unable to work in the lab during their assigned times. They can exchange hours with another student. Once the sub dates have past, the instructor removes the requests. This has the undesirable effect of leaving blank pages in the discussion. Is there some hidden voodoo way of making the most recent posts be on top, or to remove pages with no content?

[JayParekh]

@MikeBrinkman You can think about Pinning the Discussion in the course which will keep it at the top in the Discussion page.  The second suggestion would be Unpublishing the Discussions which are blank and so students won't be able to see them anymore. See below guides. 

• How do I pin a discussion in a course?
• How do I publish or unpublish a discussion in Discussions Redesign as an instructor?

Hope this is helpful. 

[MikeBrinkman]

Hi @JayParekh ,

There is a single pinned discussion that is kept open for the semester, so unpublishing a discussion is not an option. The issue is after he deletes them, the pages the deleted posts are on stay in place.

You can see below, pages 1-3 are completely blank, only page 4 has content on it.

[JayParekh]

Hi @MikeBrinkman 
I haven't seen those numbers (1 2 3 at the bottom right) before and so I'm wondering what would make it appear.  I am also bit confused with the term "pages of the deleted post" but I can still think of a couple of things that can possibly assist with your issue anyway. 

1. The discussion was created using a Test student (from Student view, which I don't recommend as it may appear as some sort of testing from student's perspective and not an actual place where they need to contribute) and therefore removing the test profile completely from the section would delete the post.   
2. Second option is asking the Teacher to close comments for individual Discussions instead of deleting them.
3. Try turning on the new Discussion/Announcement redesign interface as that allows nested replies to discussion responses which means that all replies to a discussion are not just listed down in a long list under the original discussion.

Hope this helps.