But why would you want to auto bump topics? Not questioning the feature, but trying to learn some example use cases in which I might want to consider this option.
I was looking for issues being answered by this topic (the reason I wrote it was to share how this feature worked). I ended with the call for data because I’m not sure how folks use it, either!
I’ve used it for a couple of things that I’m not sure I could recommend for community, but is great for a single-user Discourse, for taking personal notes.
First, I use it to “turn the soil” for creative writing purposes. I’ll write something, leave it alone, work on something else, a little each day. For stories or complex technical working, I use auto-bumping to assist me in working on a few things asynchronously.
Second, I’ve used it temporarily to clear out a category. “Processing” I call it. The first case can lead to the second case, where now I’m sitting on a category of topics that need to be published or shared elsewhere. I can make a call, “it takes me 10 minutes to process a topic, so I’ll auto-bumping two a day”.
The second case often ends with the removal of the topics, so after they are all gone the auto-bumping (and category!) are removed as well.
Why don’t I recommend these? I’ve never seen it done with an active community. It might generate noise if everyone isn’t aware of the process.
I imagine for creative writers doing shared world building to greatly benefit from auto-bumping all the topics in a shared category… oh that we would all be so lucky to belong to such a group!
This topic could be expanded to include scheduling a single bump for a topic, rather than only covering the category setting. In that case, it is a very useful tool to set a time everyone needs to pay attention to something again. Ex: a conversation that can’t move forward until a future event occurs, so a scheduled bump in two months is like a high-priority group reminder for the participants in that topic. We use this occasionally at Discourse.
I think that’s a case when Reset Bump Date has been used and it sent it back down into the stack and tricks it into thinking the topic is eligible for a bump again.
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