Best practice for short and long topic descriptions

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AI-generated summary

JamesDb is seeking advice on best practices for short and long topic descriptions in a forum. He wants to create an informative topic on “How to use the forum” and category descriptions, but is unsure how to handle lengthy descriptions without cluttering the preview text.

JamesDb considers adding a second post in the description topic or creating a separate topic, but is unsure about the best approach. pfaffman suggests that only the first paragraph is included in the preview, and that adding all the text there might be a solution. osioke agrees with this approach and adds that pinning a topic only pins the first original post, so it won’t affect the preview text.

Overall, the discussion suggests that adding a full description in the category post, with only the first paragraph showing in the preview, might be the best approach, and that testing different designs can help confirm the best solution.

1

So I’m trying to clean up a fairly disorganised forum. I have spent a bunch of time simplifying the forum’s categories and moving topics to the right place. Now we are recruiting moderators and want to inform the mods and the community how to use the forum and it’s categorisation

I want to an entry topic on “How to use the forum” as well as having an explanation of how to use each category

The category descriptions “About the * category name * category” are obviously the best place to have a brief description as this appears as preview text on the categories page

But what about a more in depth description? should I add that as a second post in the description topic so that it doesn’t appear in the preview? is there something you can do in the first post to prevent some text from appearing in the preview? Do I add another topic with a title like “How to use this category” ?

Also

Whats the best way to make the overall “How to use our forum” Topic? Should I make it a pinned topic so that it’s always at the top of latest? then I have the opposite problem where the preview text will always be the LAST post in that topic? Is that right?

Would love to hear how others are doing it. I saw somewhere that some people unlist the description topics too

2

I believe that preview includes just the first paragraph or something. Have you tried putting all of the text there? (The likelihood that anyone will read it will remain very low regardless of where you put it. :crying_cat_face: )

3

First off, beautiful suggestions, they all make sense and would work.

You can put the full description in your about the category post and it as Jay said, only the first paragraph would show which helps with the design you mentioned.

Then pinning the topic or any other topic only pins the first original post IIRC, so you’re good there.

You could also run tests with these designs to see how they look so you can confirm, I am currently trying to design my own forums too and I keep testing the ideas that come up for me.