I’ve created a topic containing community guidelines and pinned it globally (as a tl4 level admin) - however it doesn’t behave as I would expect.
What I would expect: The globally pinned post would be pinned in all categories in the community.
What happened: The globally pinned post is only pinned in the category that I created it in (I have to choose a category to post it in). I’ve checked this on multiple accounts, not just the admin account, and the pinned post doesn’t appear in any categories other than the one assigned to the topic.
Is this expected behaviour? If so, is there a way I can pin a single topic across all categories in my community?
I see the same behaviour as you, I hadn’t really given this much thought but the description when pinning a topic is “Make this topic appear at the top of all topic lists until”. To me, that says it will appear at the top of any list of topics, therefore including topic lists for any category.
I also tried checking the settings for the categories to see if there was a setting I was missing to allow globally pinned posts to appear, but haven’t been able to find any such setting.
I have just seen a conflicting description which matches the actual behaviour, sort of. Amongst the controls at the bottom of a globally pinned topic is this:
When viewing an individual category the appearance is of viewing a filtered Latest though, so it still seems reasonable to expect it to appear there with this description as well.
A topic pinned globally will appears at the top of the topics list (aka /latest page).
On the /categories page it will appear at the top of its own category but will not appear in the other categories.
Each category will have its own pinned topics (per category) visible.
There is no point in putting a global pinned topic at the top of each category’s topics. The result would be to have the same duplicate topic visible in the /categories page for each category.
Use the Make Banner Topic function instead of Pin Topic Globally. Or even the Versatile Banner component.
Then create the same topic in all your public categories and pin each topic by category instead of globally but the banner function was created especially for this scenario. You can change the banner style as you like with some CSS
Is this topic intended to hang around forever akin to guidelines and such or is it more of a one-off announcement? If it’s the former, it might be appropriate to add a link to it to each category’s About topic.
If it’s the latter, you could consider something like an announcements tag and even add that tag to users’ default Watching First Post.
Quite like this idea, rather than duplicating the topic several times over.
Could also style a banner as @dax mentioned, but I quite like the simplicity of not having a banner when people land on the forum.
Sorry if I am missing something super obvious here - but what is the difference between pinning a topic and pinning a topic globally? What is the intended use case for pinning something globally?
Pinned (not globally) topics will not appear on /latest or /categories unless they also happen to be a topic with recent activity, only inside their respective category like /c/dev/7/l/latest.
Globally pinned topics will appear at the top of both /latest and /categories which can be useful if your users typically start in one of those. I pretty much exclusively operate in /latest rather than filtering to individual categories which, as I understand it, is fairly common.
I can certainly imagine it being more or less common for different communities. The Discourse instance that I operate has categories for different products that our company develops so as a normal user, I would probably only be interested in the categories for the products I use.
In that scenario I could still use /latest with some categories muted but perhaps it would be more natural for people to visit the categories instead. Purely speculative though, I have no idea.
