We’ve made it easier to create support / question-and-answer type categories on Discourse! This update leverages our existing Discourse Solved plugin, but simplifies the setup process and establishes new defaults for this category type to best serve this use case.
Note: On our hosting, Discourse Solved is not available on the Free or Starter tiers.
In this topic, we’ll review the major changes and share how you can start using this today.
What’s changed
When creating a new category, you’ll now see two types:
When you select the Support category type, we’ll set up everything you need for this category type. Most importantly, this means we’ll automatically enable Allow topic owner and staff to mark a reply as the solution which lets members mark a response to their topic as a solution (see our Support category here on Meta for an example of how this looks).
On the General tab, the Category name and Style are automatically configured
All these settings can be customized to meet your exact specifications. These defaults are based on how we use this type of category in our own community and how we’ve seen it be most successful in other Discourse communities.
Turning on support type category setup in your community
For now, this is considered an experimental change! We’re welcoming your feedback, which will help us make improvements and roll this out further.
To turn this on, head to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the Enable support category type setup item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:
Thank you, glad you like it! Just to clarify this was a team effort with @j.jaffeux@zogstrip@awesomerobot and @lindsey on the self-serve XP team. We are going to do this for other category types going forward too, so stay tuned
It would be great if you could avoid forcing lowercase of the type in the “new xxx category” heading.
This string is already difficult to translate into German, because we can’t naturally reuse the type name in that position. German typically requires a compound noun (e.g. “Diskussionskategorie”), so we already have to use a workaround like:
Neue Kategorie vom Typ „Diskussion“ (literally: “new category of type ‘discussion’”)
However, the current behavior produces:
Neue Kategorie vom Typ „diskussion“
which is incorrect, because nouns must always be capitalized in German.[1] I don’t think this can be properly worked around in translations.
“Automatically close topic after this duration once marked as solved”
was chosen to replace
“Auto close topic (n) hours after the last reply once the topic has been marked as solved.”
The previous phrasing was much clearer in indicating that the timer is calculated based on the age of the last reply after marking a solution, while the new wording suggests that the timer starts from the moment the topic is marked as solved, which can be misleading.
What led to the choice of 2 days being the default closing period? I know mcwumbly recently said 30 days on Meta seem generous. But in cases where staff select the solution, 2 days seems very short. If moderators wait for the user to respond, it seems likely that the last post is older than 2 days before they select a solution, which results in the topic being closed immediately. So the user cannot easily reply that the selected solution didn’t help them.
You could add “discussion” as a text without a capital letter so it complies with the formatting rules without transforming to lowercase. Something like category_types.discussion.lowercase
I just noticed that category_types.discussion.title is lowercase. Is it possible to use title instead of name so you don’t need to break the formatting rules?
What’s changed
Turning on support type category setup in your community
What do you think?
