I’m interested in creating some categories where people are encouraged to create new topics liberally (for example, sharing links or “TIL” type posts).
I’m concerned about this cluttering up the front page and I’m aware of the “hide topics in this category from latest” setting.
Many of the topics would likely receive no replies.
But on occasion, I think some of these topics could spark a discussion. It’d be cool if there were an option to auto-unhide the topic from latest once there were a reply. (I could see the inhide criteria being more sophisticated or configurable too, but this simple approach seems like a good starting point).
What do others think? How would you use this if it existed? Would you use the this feature on your site if it existed as a core feature? If it were a plugin, would you install it?
The “commonish” reason I see for this is that if you enable embedding at the moment on a giant site we create a mountain of topics with zero replies, cause topics are created when you visit the “embedding” page.
This would help this particular case, even if we optimise our flow.
When you click “add comment” on the blog/wiki etc. we have no choice but to create a topic on the Discourse site, regardless if you go ahead and actually add a comment.
A separate, possibly complementary feature for use cases like this that I thought of this morning would be to have a tag (or list of tags) that when added to a topic, would make the topic show up on the main topic list page.
Groups that primarily discuss things in their own, semi-private unlisted category could choose to promote things to the main page that are of more general interest by adding one if these tags to the topic.
This was be kind of be an equal but opposite feature to “muted tags”.