Hi! I did try to search in the forum for an answer but did not find anything.
Is it possible somehow to move messages from a chat to create a new topic? Except making a long quote with all of the messages in the first message of the new topic.
I am encountering a situation where my users sometimes start really great discussion tread in a chat room which would work great as a topic in our forum. The problem is that in a chat these discussions will die off after a day or two and they will not get indexed by search engines. I’m really missing a feature to promote great discussions into a new topic.
If you are asking can you create a full topic with comments without showing quotes, then you can’t. Or you can, with a quite much manual labour, editing and changing ownerships.
I’m not talking only of creation of a new topic with chat messages as comments. Ideally I would remove chat massages from the chat room and move everything into a topic. Problem with quoting is that users can continue discussion within the chat like nothing has happened.
Seems like right now we can wait for the discussion to die down and archive it in a topic using quoting.
Well if it is something a moderator can’t do from a web interface it is as good as impossible.
I don’t know how other community managers feel, but I find that chats are great for naturally generating great topics. Especially if your user base do not like to create topics but loves to chat and comment.
It would be a dream to have seamless chat and forum integration. Back in the day we used a really long topics for chatting purposes, but sadly it was not good enough compared to something like Discord. Either way I’m happy to see that Discourse is incorporating chatting it the engine and I’m hopeful that some day it could become seamless chat and forum hybrid.
I don’t see any solution where you can stop that.
I move selected messages to a topic. Then I will delete those messages from channel (and that is a bit pain in the tender places because we can’t do it by bulk without lame tricks). And the last piece is telling what I did and giving link to that topic at that channel, with a humble request continuing discussion there.
You change posts owner to the user who did make original quote
Even if moderators can do it, it sounds like hell.
I did enable Discourse chat only yesterday so I’m not up to speed with the current limitations. Right now I see that there is clear separation between chat messages and posts - chat channels and topics. When we want to create a new conversation right now we need to make a choice either it will be a chat channel or topic. We can’t change this choice or go back afterwards.
To call chat and forum integration seamless I would like to just create a topic and decide afterwards should this be a chat room or should it stay as a topic. Ability to convert topic into chat channels and vice versa.
Don’t get me wrong Discourse chat is still better than using a completely separate chat platform with some sort of login gateway or even worse without it.
Hell is a bit ovetstatement. I would like to describe it like purgatory, 7th level
Yeah. Cleaning off all chattiness signs hasn’t balanced benefit/work ratio.
I’m guessing depedency between categories and channels may disapper at some point, but I would guess too that just a bit easier moving of messages to topics would achieve (almost) same goal.
But… this direction is more off topic here and should go to feature.
We do this constantly on the CDCK private instance. And that’s how we do it, as you described above.
For us it works; we summarize the discussion so far, and bring up why we’d like to take it to long form to discuss further.
Short form vs. long form discussions have a different expectation and flow to them, so it does take a bit of effort to curate the discussion and transition to a different communication mode.
It’s an act of preservation of sorts.
Why do you feel quoting into a post is insufficient? I feel it acknowledges and respects the original mode of discussion in which it took place.
I don’t know how Daniel sees it, but linking to channel and showing quotes works as an ad for chats at the quotation time. After some time, like a month or year later it just doesn’t matter any more, but makes reading a bit harder.
Please, don’t take this too seriously, but I did one small test. I know quite good how my active members act and react, so I trust on this (well… not trust-trust, but I don’t know english enough and I’m missing a word I want to use; a positive gut feeling)
If I do an ordinary copying from chat to topic (a starter or comment, no matter) that discussion is over. If I spend time and split those quotations to single comments plus I change ownerships to right persons, that discussion will continue.
So, there must be somekind mental block and lack of… personal touch/feel when users see longer quote instead of ordinary topic.
How to solve that? I don’t know. I love my free time more than needed work of manually editing topics and creating such automation would be too expensive for CDCK and defenetly too expensive for me. Because after all — that is kind of another edge case.
Yes. But I’m not totally sure if it would be a critical need — for me anyway. But we (in the meaning I ) defenetly need ability to delete (copied messages) in bulk.
I would guess it depends. If a forum
uses mostly topics and chat is… minor one, then moving messages as a real topic is important, because majority of discussion happends on topic-level
has adopted chat really hard then copying as mass quote is enough, because it serves only searching and archieving
My experience is that Google values OP over comments, and sees starting point and comments as two separate things. And if that is true the main isssue on SEO-level is much wider. Just because quite often the real value comes from comments. And… then nowadays’ system would be better.
But my forum is way too small in every metrics to measure that and here and now (new experience…) I can be really wrong.
True. Only thing I would note is that different communities may be focused more on one discussion form. My community is more short form focused so it would be really easy to move discussions.
It is not as readable. For instance “Reply to” is not transferred in the quote which makes it at times a unreadable mess. I get distinctive “archive” feeling from quoting. As well I need to wait for a day or two for the discussion to die off to quote it because I don’t want 2 streams of conversation at the same time.
I will experiment with it, but I feel that it may be problematic to give discussion a second breath of life as a topic.
“Move to topic” or “Create topic” buttons would be great and would solve the problem completely.
For me another big reason is to get more user coverage with a topic. Chats more or less are for users who login each day, but topics work great as well for users who login once per week. I really don’t like to punish users for not logging in every day using the feeling that they will miss out on a conversation.
I think I can understand though. We are also using chat mostly as off-topic banter and some people REALLY love it. But in that high-pressure firehose of stream of consciousness blast, ideas occasionally surface that we’d love to grab and present on the forum where a lot of members who don’t chat hang out.
It would be terrifyingly useful if Admins, moderators, high TL regulars; could transmogrify a selection of chat messages into a multiple-message forum thread, following the same reply structure as chat. That way non-chatters could reply to individual ideas in the otherwise live linear chat flow that’s so hard to catch up to several hours later. If you miss solving the Birchenbacher Paradox in the middle of the night, you missed out. Someone was on the verge of inventing time-travel, but the chat was suddenly distracted by Eurovision news…
Plus, since we prefer the “chat is purged at 90 days” default setting it’d be great if we could forum-ize and preserve great moments.
and creating such automation would be too expensive for CDCK and defenetly too expensive for me. Because after all — that is kind of another edge case.