The discussion explores best practices for revisiting and clarifying the top 100 most visited topics in the Community category. ganncamp raises concerns about editing original posts to consolidate wisdom, suggesting staff notices as an alternative, but questions whether participants are notified. Lilly clarifies that staff notices don’t notify participants but suggests using @here to do so, and notes that pinning the topic could help. Bas questions the reluctance to edit OPs, noting that editing is a standard practice for higher trust levels, and proposes better alternatives: using the ‘solved’ feature or creating a new topic with a link to the old one. JammyDodger supports distilling answers into FAQs or guides, closing the original topic with a link, and using onebox links to notify watchers while preserving searchability.
Specifically, we looked at some of the most-visited topics today. Many of them are long threads without accepted answers.
I’m deeply reluctant to edit an OP to consolidate the thread’s collective wisdom.
One thing we looked at today was adding a staff notice on the OP with that collective wisdom. E.G.
What’s not clear to me is whether the participants in the thread are notified when a staff notice is added. (I did search here, and I think the answer is “no” but I couldn’t find a definitive statement.) I ask because I’d like to add some new information to this popular topic (we’re targeting the next release for the requested feature) and I’m sure all the participants would want to know.
What, in general, are your best practices for “revisit and clarify”?
I’d love to understand a bit more on why you are reluctant?
Here on Meta, changing the content of a post is something that happens often. It is explicitly a power granted by the different trust levels.
(Trust Level 3 grants editing titles & categories; TL4 allows full edits)
But assuming you have your reasons
I don’t really think a staff notice is the way to go. It feels a bit too in-your-face and I don’t think they are included in the community search (which is a main benefit of rewriting).
My preferred approaches would be:
Reply with a complete question/answer post and mark it as the official solution (assuming you’re using Discourse Solved)
For ones that begin as Support requests, we often distil all the answers/knowledge into a FAQ or guide, and close the topic off with a post including a nice onebox link to the new one so people Watching the topic get a ping (though you can also pop a link at the top in staff notice or insert a note in the OP as well). This helps to preserve the history with the built-in backlinking, but also the ‘discovery route’ as well, if people are finding the original through google or onsite search.
