Create index topic

Let’s see if I can explain what I would like to do…

I want to create a topic (“My index“) that will only contain links to other topics, added automatically via some kind of “system”, a “tag”, I don’t know.

So, using a tag as an example, when I create a new topic (“My book“) and I add the tag #index, this topic would automatically be added to “My index” as a link in the body.

So “My index” would keep updating with links to topics that contain the tag #index.

Is this possible?

I’m aware that I could just share the link to the tag page, but I was wondering if this would be possible with a topic instead?

If I end up having to use the tag route, would I be able to make the topics on that page (the tag page) not sort by “latest”? If I want the topics to be ordered by creation date (newest to oldest), but for that specific tag only.

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I completely understand what you’re describing with an index topic! This would have been really handy a few months ago when we were using a category to kind of organically create an FAQ. Despite showing my users how to filter the topic list by tags, share links to tag pages, etc., one of them ended up creating and managing an index on their own with a Word doc that linked to the topics. It was so interesting, because they organized the index Word doc the same way the topics were tagged.

Anyway, if an index topic as @alltiagocom describes is possible, I think it’s a great way to provide an alternative option for those stubborn users who simply have different preferences for viewing and finding information they’re looking for. Yes, they could just use the current tag filtering… but in the case of my community, some people will do extraordinary things when something that could be useful doesn’t exist.

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This is interesting. People use Discourse in so many different ways!

@alltiagocom can you explain your use case in some more detail? Why do you want to create a topic that contains an automatically generated list of topics with a certain tag? Can you share an example of what you’d like this to look like?

I think I understand @sbrawley case, for organically creating a FAQ. But unless you’re talking about a huge list, why not just maintain a topic with a list of links in it manually? That way you can also control the appearance of it and specify the ordering. Your members seem to be on the right track, though a topic (which you can make a wiki and maintai n collaboratively) is of course more suitable than a word doc.

There is Discourse Doc Categories which lets you specify a topic as index for documentation, where you can insert links that are then used in the sidebar navigation.

You can see an example of this in action in Documentation. Example index: Using Discourse Index

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