I can pin a topic but if there is more than one pinned, the order gets rearranged. I’d like to always keep the Welcome topic above other important announcements that I want to keep near the top for awhile.
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Perhaps that topic could be a banner topic? Banner topics are the ultimate “on top” and look like this:
Try browsing around there a bit to see what I mean.
You can banner a topic via the admin wrench menu on a topic in the upper right.
That works great for the site, but I need a different banner for each category.
The only way to do it at this time is to un-pin and re-pin to force it back to the top of the pinned topics.
We don’t recommend having too many pinned topics if you can avoid it, as they can become overwhelming for users.
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I’m only using two or three on private categories. If the Welcome topic drops below then it is a little odd.I can do the unpin/pin trick for now.
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I, too, agree that this is a good feature.
When there are 2 or more pinned topics in particular categories, I find it would be very useful if I could order them.
Unpin-and-pin-again workaround is OK, but still, is it in the TODO list?
P.S. I too have 2 to 3 - not many actually, but I wish I were able to set their order, perhaps by dragging or inputting an ordering natural number.
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The hack to re-order pinned topics seems to no longer work:
- I have 3 pinned topics, which I’d like displayed in a particular order
- The newest topic I added & pinned is at position-1 instead of desired position-3
- So I implement the hack, to unpin & re-pin the other 2 topics so that they are displayed above this new topic
- … but nothing changes, un-pin/re-pin does not re-shuffle the order
Any ideas on this?
… however, by editing the text in the topic I can re-shuffle the order
So the hack to re-order pinned topics is to actually edit the topic text so that desired topics appear at the top of the list
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Editing doesn’t seem to reorder them if the pinned topics are closed, at least for me (using beta).
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I haven’t tested it with closed topics (till now all my topics have been open) & I’ve been able to do this numerous times, so I can confirm that it is working for me
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Great, it might make better sense that they don’t reorder once they’re closed anyhow. So once the desired order is set, can close them and freely edit them without worrying about the order.
Aaahaa 
Good piece of info to save the hassle of always having to do the re-ordering jig if I edit something 
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I actually don’t have this effect: when editing the 3rd pinned topic down the list of pinned topics, it doesn’t bump it at the top. Any idea why? Unpinned topics do behave as expected (bump when edited).
[EDIT] Those pinned topics aren’t closed.
[EDIT] Unpin & re-pin globally still makes it reappear at the 3rd place.
Editing the post shouldn’t have anything to do with pin order.
However, un-pin and re-pin should change order. On try.discourse.org I pinned these three topics in this order:
I unpinned the bottom one (What’s your all-time) and then re-pinned … and that did NOT affect the pin order, so our advice here is no longer correct. Even un-pinning the second one (A bear) and re-pinning it did not affect the order!
Looks like @metadiscourseuser was right. There’s a new additional step. Un-pin, edit, then re-pin. We need some kind of fix or solution here – can you schedule this for next week @eviltrout?
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Also I just realized there are a few variables here:
- pin globally
- pin in category
It’s possible that global pins aren’t influenced by un-pin and re-pin in the way that category pins are, so we have to figure out which one we’re talking about. I’ll test in a bit.
@tshenry can you take this for the coming week? We need some proper testing and a solution here. I’m not a fan (to put it mildly…) of pinned topics, but there should be a way to set their order, as previously defined in this topic.
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Here’s what I found with my testing:
- When looking at sets of global pins and sets of category-specific pins, the order appears to be influenced exclusively by bump date
- Pinning and unpinning do not appear to cause a bump and therefore do not affect the order of the pinned topics
- I checked the following bump actions and they successfully placed a pinned topic above the others:
- Replied to a pinned topic
- When there are no replies, edited the OP
- Set a 1 minute “bump” topic timer (you can delete the small action past and the bump will persist)
Let me know if there are any other scenarios you would like to test!
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Looks OK to me, @sam @eviltrout what are your opinions on this? Should we make it easier, or is this sufficient?
(from my perspective, we want friction around pinned topics, so I vote for the status quo, but properly documented)
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I don’t love to support “quirk that works for our purposes.” If the order of pinned topics is important we should add a way to specify it in the database properly with some kind of interface. My vote would be to leave as is unless we want to do that.
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Sure. What do you think @sam? My vote is “as-is” but I think your opinion could make the final decision.
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I guess the question … leading all the way up to the OP here is.
Should pinning ignore topic list ordering? At the moment when you look at latest, it sorts pins by bumped_at and then the rest by bumped_at.
Fiddle with ordering on the list, you will impact the ordering of both pins and non pins.
I do feel for this feature request and the change is trivial.
We could unconditionally regardless of topic list ordering, order pins based off “pinned_at” date. We already have all the information and the cost of the change is low.
Advantage from a site operators perspective is that they can easily and unconditionally keep the most important pin at the top. (want something on top, unpin / pin)
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Ok then it is decided! Since the work is easy, let’s make it so! 
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