I tried to Google it, but couldn’t find anything related to this.
I think that some topics can be very valuable, but users tend to focus more on the latest ones (unless they come to a forum from a Google search, for example).
Is it possible, maybe through a component/plugin, to have a category or something like that, where it loads random topics automatically? This would revive some old posts that maybe 3 years ago didn’t have that much engagement, but were still valuable, and maybe now with more users it could have the attention they deserve.
To be clear, I don’t want the random topics to be limited to a single category, even though that could also be good. I was thinking more of a global feature where any topic from any category could be loaded into that section. basically the same way that when I go to the home page of https://meta.discourse.org/ I can see a list of all the latest topics, regardless of the category, but in my case, it would load random topics also from any category, but not focused on the topics’ date or even latest replies.
I like the idea of random topics, but I suppose there should be tweaks to be made.
My forum is 20+ years old and it would be weird to have a page with a bunch of random topics older than a decade.
If you want to target topics with low engagement, there should be a parameter like the max number of replies to show up.
Even so, it doesn’t mean that all these low-engagement topics are interesting.
Do you want to target topics on some criteria, or just… Random ones?
The closest thing that exists lies in the category settings:
It was (maybe still is?) used here on Support, as a Support topics’ ideal state is solved/closed. Open topics here typically means that no solution was provided, so it gives a chance to low-engagement topics to be looked at, even if it is months of years after - it can always be valuable.
It could be a specific category, for example, or even a button to Randomize.
Or maybe just a section at the bottom of the latest posts that would load like 3 or 4 old random posts?
Even posts from your 20+ years old forum can be relevant today, but maybe when they were created, no one really paid attention and they could get some “love” now
