When a staff action (e.g., “Close Topic”, “Pin Topic”) is performed on a topic, a special post (“small action post”) is automatically added to the topic.
Please add a setting that allows administrators to control whether small action posts will cause the topic to be bumped.
Current behavior
The topic is bumped when a staff action causes the creation of a small action posts. This is often not helpful to the users.
I think there is a sneaky user preference that may help in this situation - ‘Consider topics unread when they are closed’. You can find it on your https://meta.discourse.org/my/preferences/tracking page.
If you uncheck that it stops a topic close from being counted as ‘unread’.
ETA: Though there doesn’t appear to be an admin setting to choose the default in the same way as a lot of the other user preferences (the ones in /admin/site_settings/category/user_preferences). That might be a nice addition.
And just to clarify, when you say ‘bumped’ do you mean that they get the blue unread indicator and appear in /unread? I don’t think closed topics are bumped in the traditional way where they get put at the top of /latest (whether manually closed or by a timer).
Also, I think the auto-close timers use a ‘silent’ version of closing already where it suppresses the unread indicators, so hopefully those ones are not appearing in /unread lists.
Thanks @JammyDodger. This is an effective workaround for the individual user, but I am requesting a solution the administrator can apply to the entire forum.
It would, but that would only solve the problem for users who created an account after the time the default was changed, right?
Correct.
I have personally verified that they do appear in the /unread lists.
If that preference admin setting was added then it should be possible to update all existing users too. (though for closed actions rather than the full suite of pinned, unlisted, split, etc)
Which method are you using to auto-close them? There may be a version that’s not using the ‘silent’ option yet.
Sorry to focus on ‘closed’ ones, but they’re generally the worst offender when it comes to ‘noise’ like this.
The “Don’t close until the last post in the topic is at least this old.” category setting is enabled.
And to eliminate it from consideration as a possible factor, I’ll also mention that the “Number of open topics to automatically bump daily” category setting is set to 0.
Although less impactful due to occurring less frequently, it also doesn’t make sense to bump a topic when it is archived, and I also don’t think it makes sense to bump a topic just because it was unpinned. This is why I generalized my request instead of making it specifically about auto-close.
I think these are very valid points and definitely worth a conversation to see if others also find these kind of things ‘non-events’ too. I know there’s been some discussion about not including these in the reply count for similar reasons.
I did give this a test run earlier and my test user didn’t have them arrive in their /unread, but when I look at the status_type of the timers in data explorer they’re getting a 1 (close) rather then an 8 (silent close) so there’s a chance I’m borking my test somehow.
The user’s “Unread” topic list is polluted with topics which don’t have any activity of interest.
(though for closed actions rather than the full suite of pinned, unlisted, split, etc)