I like the idea of a separate area for gardening items, and a group inbox – or even a Gardening category – does sound easier to manage than a megatopic.
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It might be worth trying a megatopic first and seeing how it goes.
If it feels unwieldy, we can move to a category (or a tag we norm on using withing Site Feedback).
But for what we are discussing here, I think we might find a megatopic sufficient.
(Chat could play a role here too)
Happy to experiment in this space with you all.
Regardless of the implementation, I do like the idea of having a place where this kind of collaboration can happen among the people who care to pay attention to this level of detail.
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I wonder how often a topic is closed without action, as a “won’t fix” or “not really an issue” kind of item. Tags would be the way to filter closed topics on that basis.
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Hmm… if it’s a megatopic, would having automatic reply deletion after, say, a week, make sense? Because if the tag is added/change is made, it won’t need to stay there forever?
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I think it’s ok not to garden the gardening topic itself.
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Thank you everyone - I think that this discussion has now successfully aired the underlying issues quite nicely, as well as a few quite workable ways to tackle this ‘gardening’ (and I feel heard).
However, I’m not sure a megatopic is the best way forwards for this; if we are maximally flexing Discourse features, then a Chat Channel with threading is a much better fit in my mind.
This sort of stuff is definitely ephemeral; once a ‘small thing’ is fixed, there is zero value in keeping a record of the fact on a Topic. Likewise, there would be no value in these trivial / gardening things turning up in search at all.
It would also make it a reasonably easy thing to find, and relatively unobtrusive. It would also allow a convenient emoji to mark when something was sorted. Maybe TL2 and above to keep it from cluttering things up for newbies?
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This reminds me of this Feature topic Please distinguish flags for "bad" things from organizational and "please help" flags - #20 by mattdm.
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How do you want to keep track of what has been resolved in the mega gardening topic?
Missing images at Meta.discourse.org was kind of a gardening topic tied to one problem. To keep track of what had been resolved, checkboxes for each report were added and then checked later. I understand that it was the easiest way to keep track of things there, but all those edits were quite noisy. So, I don’t think this is a good solution for a larger gardening topic.
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I think theres a difference between a closed feature request, and one that has a clear completed tag. The first one could be closed for any number of reasons: no longer valid, won’t do, not possible,…
My only concern with having non-staff do it, is that they have to be very certain it’s actually completed. Hence my preference for trying to make it a habit that the person who fixes or completes something, just updates that on meta.
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