Best practices for "revisit and clarify the top 100 most visited topics."

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After reading Bas’ excellent guide about general strategies to increase engagement (my characterization, not his) we’re talking about following through with some of his suggestions.

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”?

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AFAIK, staff notices do not notify topic participants, but you could use the @here mention in a staff notice to do so.

could possibly also pin the topic after you post an update.

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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 :slight_smile:

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)
  • Post a fresh topic, linking the old one
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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.

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