By the way, when I signed up an account for testing today, the topic wasn’t at the top of /top. I guess it’s because there was no activity in the past week?
Hmm.. I just tested and I do see the welcome topic pinned to the top. “New to Discourse? Start here!” is the welcome topic.
Really, what I’d love is a site setting to choose the topic that new members see right away upon logging in, and direct them to this topic. That way I can be certain they have been shown it and there is a good chance they actually read it!
1 Like
That is very strange indeed. I just tested it again (this time in Safari) and see the same thing I saw in my screenshot above. This is the first page you see when you activate your new account? Mine also has a different heading eg “Week” without the date range.
I did notice that before logging in the Top page does not show any pinned topics, and it looks almost like your screenshot but without the “Welcome, username” heading.
Also when logged in as my test user, clicking the Top button makes the pinned welcome topic go away even though the AMA pinned topic remains. It also changes the timeframe to Year and indicates the date range. Strange.
It seems like in all cases but mine it is displaying the pinned topics only if the pinned topic merits being in top.
It seems to work most of the time. When I tried it on my laptop, it looked the same as yours. On my tablet, it looked like this.
When I take a closer look at your screenshot, the topics don’t look like /top, but like latest. They all have activity from the past few minutes, as if the wrong list is loaded.
On my screenshot and one that someone shared with me, the topics are different.
1 Like
Yes, that looks right! Somehow something is wrong here, specifically on meta. Can you verify that this is not happening on other sites you use?
I tested it on my personal site and I am seeing what you see, immediately after logging in for the first time. When I refresh the page, the “Welcome to our community! These are the most popular recent topics.” goes away.
One other oddity I am seeing on meta is that the default TOP timeframe is weekly, also on your screenshots. In the site settings the default range is set to be yearly so this should be yearly for all of us.
From my experience on my personal site, it appears the pinned topics are not intended to be shown at all on TOP, which makes sense if they are not the top topics we are seeking to direct people to. But unfortunately that means new members are not being directed to the welcome topic as I thought they were.
Oh, and one final note. When testing on my personal site I also ran into a situation where I was not taken to TOP upon signing up. I had clicked a link to a topic that required login to see it. After signing up, I was directed back to that topic instead of to TOP. That feels strange, too. I believe that’s the desired behavior when you click the sign up button on a public topic.