Looking for a way to mark topics for future reference

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1

I have a unique need which is at the edge of normal operation but would appreciate suggestions on how I could approach the issue.

We are moving from a listserv type periodic digest to Discourse. Our current digests include links and an invitation to join our Discourse based Community, which happens under SSO. After 8 weeks 800 (about half) have done so.

Some members like the digest and are reluctant to move. We wish to continue to support those users at least for a time, even if through a manual process: once or twice a week we can handle.

My current idea is to periodically pick a single topic, copy-paste into a text processor (which I would write) to scrub out the repeating text (like “Bookmark Share Flag Reply”) and send it on our current digest mailer.

The question: How could I ‘mark’ each topic I send to remind me not to send it again? Flagging it is wrong. I thought about giving the topic a ‘you made the digest’ badge, but badges go to users.

The only thing I can think of is to bookmark the ones I use. It would be nice to have a search for non-bookmarked topics but only ‘bookmarked’ is an option.

Am I missing a simple solution?

It would also be nice to have a way to download a topic without the repeating text content, but that seems more complicated…

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2

Sounds like a good use case for tags, staff only tags, in this case.

That way every time a post is “promoted” you can add a tag to it to ensure you won’t do it twice.

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3

Have you considered using tags? There’s a setting that allows specific tags to be used by Staff only, which you could use:

staff-tags
staff-tags1172×439 22.8 KB

As well, going to the tag url would display all of the topics that you’ve applied that tag to. Taking it one step further, you could also use CSS to color that tag specifically so that it’s easy to spot. Something like this, where digested is replaced with the tag you want to use:

.tag-box a[data-tag-name="digested"] {
    background: #ea1d1d;
    color: #fff;
}

Example:
tag-color

EDIT: Rafael got to it as I was posting this!

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4

Thank you both! That would work with one challenge: when you add a tag to a topic it updates the edit timestamp so that topic comes to the top of the ‘latest’ stack again.

I may be able to make that work since I’m only doing one at a time, although I recently ran into that as an issue when I added a new tag and updated several old messages… they all rose mysteriously to the top.

Its worth pondering!

5

That only happens if the topic has zero replies, which should be highly unusual for a promoted topic.

You can also reset the bump date if necessary

image
image.png1797×717 80.8 KB

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6

Interesting. Thanks! Researching that also led me to two other interesting solutions: Staff notes or staff color. I could add a note about when I used that topic, which could be useful. Or just set the color.

I’ll assume that ‘staff color’ is only visible to the staff… I continue to be amazed at the clever features in this tool as I learn.

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