I just had a wonderful first interaction on Discourse Meta:
I was able to resolve my issue of my pinned posts not staying on the top, by taking the topics out of the subcategory I had placed them in. I did not find this behavior to be intuitive. At first I asked myself, “Why would placing a topic in a subcategory make the pins not stay on top?”
I did some experimenting and found that when looking only at that topic’s subcategory, then it would indeed stay at top. I imagine there are use cases where admins only want a post to be pinned to the top in its specified subcategory.
But even so, the user admin experience of pinning a post but not having it go to the top was confusing.
I looked more closely at the Pinning dialogue and realized that I had missed a clue:
For topics in subcategories, maybe after the highlighted line, it could say something like:
“This topic will only be pinned to the top when viewing this subcategory.”
Likewise, if an admin tries to move a pinned topic to a subcategory, perhaps there could be a warning that appears, saying, “This topic will now only be pinned to the top when viewing the subcategory [subcategory name]”.
Likewise, maybe there could be a different pin icon for topics in subcategories. Perhaps, a smaller pin, or some other variation.
What are your thoughts and experiences?
That said, I would like to put in a word of thanks to the Discourse Meta community that has given me a very positive first experience, and to the Discourse developers, that have created such a marvelous platform for community discussions. Thank you.