Collapse off-topic replies

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

francislavoie proposes a feature to “collapse off-topic replies” in evergreen content topics, similar to GitHub’s functionality. This would allow for reducing noise while keeping the topic’s history intact. However, after researching existing plugins and theme components, francislavoie couldn’t find a suitable solution. Canapin confirms that no such feature currently exists and suggests possible workarounds, such as creating an associated discussion topic or chat channel, but notes potential limitations.

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We have a wiki category in our instance, and it’s really useful to allow evergreen content to be written and maintained.

One thing that often happens though is that someone will reply with feedback to the original post. That’s nice and useful, but then that comment is left there forever. We could delete those comments after the feedback was addressed, but that doesn’t feel nice because it loses context of why certain changes were made.

What I’d rather have is something similar to Github, where you can mark a reply as hidden so it would just collapse it so it would just show as a thin row that could be clicked to expand/reveal the original reply. That would keep the topic’s history intact, while reducing noise in that evergreen topic.

I read through the list of plugins and theme components, and I couldn’t find anything that implements this. Did I miss one? If not, I guess consider this a feature/plugin request!

8 Likes
Dedicated chat channels for wikis (and maybe other topics)
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As far as I know, there is no such feature.
There’s a replies auto-deletion system, but only staff can see the deleted message.

The closest using built-in features I think of would be:

  1. An associated discussion in another topic where feedback is discussed (and the topic would be linked at the top or bottom of the wiki)

  2. An associated chat channel (but there is no search feature in chat right now)

I don’t know how easy it would be to have a theme component or plugin that would toggle the visibility of the replies (and how the timeline would react to this).