The discussion focuses on making staff responses more visible in Discourse forums. rhrmn suggests allowing staff to pin specific replies to the original post, similar to Solution topics, to increase visibility and reduce the need for users to read entire topics. dax links to a relevant topic on customizing staff posts, but rhrmn finds this insufficient, as it still requires users to read the entire topic. Jonathan5 proposes customizing the Solution plugin, an idea rhrmn likes, suggesting a Status plugin. riking recommends enabling the Solved feature in bug report categories and, as a workaround, manually editing the original post to link to relevant staff responses.
As a moderator on the official Age of Empires forums I feel that the visibility of staff and developer replies is very important for communication to the community that a game issue is being investigated, what the potential work-arounds may be and providing a status update on the investigation.
I was thinking that it would be helpful for staff or developers to have an ability to show the latest (or any particular) staff or developer reply on the original post like the Solution type topics and also show a text string at the end of the topic linking to this response. Too often staff and developer replies are lost in all of the bug report replies from community members and not all community members have the time to read every reply in a topic. May the Discourse team please consider adding such a feature?
Hi Daniela, The #5 feature in the topic you linked is appreciated, however it still requires the user to read the entire topic to find the staff post. The suggestion I made was to be able to be able to promote or pin a specific staff reply and likewise unpromote or unpin, similar to how Solution topics work, which would show in the original post and at the end of the topic. I feel this would be much more helpful than the staff color feature.
If your bug report category doesn’t have Solved enabled, I highly recommend turning that on as a first step. Note: on Meta, we close bug reports topics when they’re solved. The solution is, then, always at the bottom.
As a high-effort method, you can edit the link to the staff post into the OP by hand whenever something particularly relevant is posted in a hard-to-navigate thread. Basically, manually mimic the Solved plugin.