Automatically bumping old topics on a category

[csandstedt]

Is there a way to disable the bump notification history at the bottom of the topic?

[Ubik]

Would it be possible please to have periodic auto-bumps. for example “Every 6, 12 hours, 24 hours, weekly (until stopped)” etc?

The forum I moderate has had great success manually auto-bumping a topic with our forum-specific rules every day or so, and when that’s maintained it seems to increase awareness of some very specific requirements we have - but needing a mod to set the auto-bump manually isn’t ideal.

I believe seeing an important topic as an active topic, bumping about at the top of Latest, seems to draw things to people’s attention better than both automated signup PMs and dusty pinned topics (got to confess I joined another forum myself last week, and didn’t even read their pinned stuff).

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I’ll add an edit: the first time we used this was to cover the 2018 mid-terms, we had just recently brought in a forum rule about political posts and wanted to make sure people knew in advance that it had changed, and auto-bumped the information as well as manually bumping it by making the last post on the topic myself, then editing it to bump that, without adding posts.

It worked brilliantly and led to knowledge of the change reaching saturation point very quickly so we had absolutely no problems, and no flagged posts etc. So I’d just like to be able to automate the periodic aspect, instead of having to remember to set it, or making the last post myself, then using periodic edits to get a bump.

[JimPas]

Would this help?

Automatically bumping old topics on a category

On certain categories it makes sense to bump old topics automatically on a regular basis. On buying/selling categories in can make sense to regularly bump visibility while a topic is open and item is still on sale. In #support categories it may make sense to bump old topics in case they were forgotten Till now the only way to raise visibility was to “edit” the last post of a topic or post a bump reply. Both of these solutions are not ideal. We just added a new category setting called:…

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

Brilliant!

@sam

IF there exists an non-closed , visible , non-archived , non category description and non-pinned topic that was bumped less than 24 hours ago.

So it’s per category, not per topic, but you could either create its own category or lock all the other topics in the category. Seems like a pretty close solution to me.

[th21]

If i set a bump number on a parent category, will the topic in its sub category also be bumped?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

No, just that category.

[sunjam (james.network)]

We are specifically looking to bump recurring weekly events automatically within our “General” category. Any ideas on how to do this with a topic appreciated!

[Falco]

If they are specific topics, you want to use Discourse Event for that.

[sunjam (james.network)]

We do exactly this, but the event is still buried within other posts despite being recurring. We need it to auto-notify / pin / spam the forum / spam the calendar for every upcoming week in the future. Right now people just make new posts about the recurring weekly events, because it just doesn’t make enough sense to dig into an “old” topic that no one can find once it completes. And, these are super tech competent people in addition to noobs.

So, not sure what to do. Once an event finishes the first time it is not as useful to keep it recurring, in comparison to making a new thread for the same event with a new title date… but it just takes so much manual intervention to update for mods/admins… so we are stuck in how to promote our weekly, recurring events.

It is a wicked cycle. Most common questions I see:
“Where is the weekly event info again?”
“Are weekly events still happening?”
“How come I never know weekly events are happening?”
“Why does the forum calendar look like this? I’ll use meetup.”

We just need users to see both past and all future recurring events. This makes no sense to students or teachers:

When meetup opens up the first thing I see is links to past and upcoming events.

What I’m trying to say is we have not been able to migrate from meetup to the forum for events. It isn’t a smooth transition and so now users are frustrated about why we would want to make them use this when it hasn’t worked for us. It is a bummer and I love the software, which we will certainly continue to use without relying on it for events and calendars yet. (thanks for reading and I love Discourse). Just sharing our experience, perhaps this is the wrong thread. Cheers.

[Falco]

Sounds like a feature request for events topics to auto bump x hours before the recurrence.

[riking (Kane York)]

Rendering future recurrent events on the calendar is also a critical feature that’s part of the request.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@sunjam

We need it to auto-notify / pin / spam the forum / spam the calendar for every upcoming week in the future.

So the feature request is for the event topic (assuming the event is in the first post) to auto-bump itself… when? A day before? The day of? That makes sense to me.

The event itself has a reminder section if you edit the event… is there some reason the reminders aren’t working?

[sunjam (james.network)]

Here is our current event layout.

and here is the actual event topic.

Our users are spread across many services due to the “network effect”, so we are x-posting from our General channel to Slack. We also have this event pinned globally, but seems that was from back in 11/2020