How do I set the order of pinned topics

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Sure, @Osama a small one for you, careful with the tests and perf, topic_query gets very complicated.

Low priority, no urgency here at all.

[ked (Kenny DuBose)]

@sam

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)

I read and follow the conversation here, down to this statement (which suggests that this approach is decided upon and implemented). I am however not observing re-ordering based upon unpinning/repinning.

Is there something I’m obviously missing?

EDIT: I just discovered that in fact this operation is still being influenced by whether the Topic is Closed or not. So, opening it seemed to do the trick.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Kenny, my suggestion is still on @Osama’s list, we will get this sorted over the next 2 weeks or so.

[Osama]

@sam

We could unconditionally regardless of topic list ordering, order pins based off “pinned_at” date.

This PR implements this behavior:

FEATURE: Order pinned topics by their `pinned_at` column

[Terrapop]

Hi all, I just noticed the change after updating our community. For our use case, this new behavior is very suboptimal. Any chance to have an option for the old behavior via a setting in the admin section?

[Simon_Manning]

I would probably want to report that as a bug if I had been using Discourse for longer. It makes the change on the basis that the previous behaviour is undesirable, removing behaviour that admin and regular users will have come to expect and may or may not desire.

In addition, the way the feature is described implies that the purpose is to give admin more control over the order, however that feels incomplete as there is no means of reordering the pins besides unpinning/pinning.

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I think pin ordering should be a setting at category level. An option to choose between bumped_at and pinned_at, defaulted to bumped_at for a relatively simple change that doesn’t affect existing admin. (I recognise that is made non-trivial by localisation though.)

Longer term, I think this should be a fixed pin positions checkbox with UI to reorder the pins much like the UI for reordering categories when using fixed category positions.

[Terrapop]

100% agree. For us, this latest change has a negative impact. As we dynamically globally pin and unpin topics based on engagement via the API. Now users can’t see anymore to which of the pinned topics another user replied last because the whole pinned section is not dynamic anymore but static.

[Terrapop]

Engagement in our community is already falling off the cliff since this change. Kindly can we get a setting for this and optionally revert to the old behavior, or do I have to patch this change out of core?