One of the things we use our forum for is to engage with and get feedback from users about our products. This often consists of us creating a new topic where we share some info + screenshots of features our team is working on, then directly asking for user feedback and/or providing a poll to capture people’s initial thoughts.
Our issue is that these topics tend to quickly get buried by other new topics that are not related. So we’re looking into ways we can better make this content “sticky”, aka easy for users to see and access so they can find it and better engage in the community.
I know there’s the native Discourse option of pinning a topic. Pinning something in a category isn’t my favorite, since it still requires someone to go to a category to see it pinned there. Pinning a topic on the main page is alright, though we do have 2 topics already pinned there and I don’t know that I’d want to go beyond 2 since it can lead to more scrolling. But we are keeping this option in mind as a sort of backup.
Another option we were considering was a banner component, like the ones mentioned here. This could work, though it’s a little more effort updating it every time we want to showcase a new topic. But it also seems like a good way to prettify and present these topics front and center.
Any other ideas for plugins, components, or even native Discourse stuff that you guys have used to highlight important pieces of content on your forums?