Is there any way for me as an admin to reward great and well written topics?
Basically I would love to be able to “flag” topics in a positive way, and in any way possible by doing so reward the post itself and/or the member who wrote it.
For example: a “Great Post Flag” that automatically adds the post into a special section that has all the best posts like a big resource bank?
Sincerely,
Mike
What you’re looking for is called a badge. Just create a custom badge and grant it to the post author mentioning the link to post as reason.
Ah thank you, I am still new to Discourse so I am fumbling around to learn every feature. 
This is great to reward the author with the badge, very nice.
Is there also a way to somehow “mark” the post as an extra valuable post , by marking it so that it would show in some kind of “Best Topics of All Time” section or something?
You can probably pin it so it shows on top of that category.
Ah yes, I am already using pins a lot. But in this case I want to basically have a section in my community that shows a list of all best topics of all time.
I could of course add everyone manually with a link, but it would be great to simply have a “flag” that automatically adds that topic to the “Best Topic List”
In discourse sense, we use flags to report issues with something. That’s why we have all the problem situations mentioned in flag section.
Even if you flag it, it will only be notified to the staff not to the entire user base.
If you’re looking for something that isn’t already supported, it needs to be in a custom plugin territory.
That’s the like button. And there is logic that uses likes and other factors to rate posts
It’s true that “likes” work well for all users, but I would love to know if there is a feature for admins to “mark” particularly great topics.
Basically: “bookmarking” but on an admin level, and by doing so creating a curated list of the best topics (like a resource database).
An unorthodox solution will be to create a category, call it Good reads (or whatever you like) then move all such topics to that category. Encourage your readers to visit that category by adding a banner topic on homepage.
Would tags work here? You could tag all these great topics as “star posts” or something and that tag would then link to all those great topics.
Oh, I imagine it would. Honestly I am so new to Discourse and my forum, that I haven’t even learned what tags do haha. Thank you for the suggestion!
The discussion is meandering a bit, but
This exists as the “Top” page i.e.
https://meta.discourse.org/top
Staff by default has staff_like_weight: 3
The easiest, if not perfect approach would be to tweak up that value and trust your staff to Like only posts they wanted in the Top topic list.
A more perfect approach might be to have a plugin that creates a “super Liker” to allow more control over the skewing of the Top topic list.
That is a wonderful suggestion about tweaking that value, I think I will try that. Thank you!
This is a great topic!
I’m looking for this feature too.