A tiny twist I do support is unconditionally including posts that have “Staff Notices”, seems like a small change that would make lots of sense.
Are all notices for good reasons?
I would say they are always there cause the mods think they are important and they want people to read them.
I hear you, but part of the advice we explicitly give staff is that they need to make participation part of their daily routine too…
Leadership comes from the top. The presence of staff speaks volumes about whether your community is alive and thriving. Don’t just say you believe in this community, demonstrate that through your personal participation and enthusiasm. Lead by example. Reply to questions people have, help your community learn the ropes, gently guide and shape the community as you go.
… otherwise how can you expect others to?
So, is there any hope we can make access to summarize more readily available?
How exactly, what specifically are you proposing?
Ideally access from the topic progress/timeline. Failing that something in the topic controls. It’s a great feature but it’s only visible directly below the OP, so it’s easily forgotten and horribly underused.
That’s not much of an actual proposal. One thing that’s been discussed, but I think would be far too extreme, is for old long topics to be forced into summary mode when you open them.
Reddit actually does something like this as a default for anonymous users… experiment over there to see what I mean.
A call out when a user enters their first large topic to educate them on the feature would be killer.
Problem there is when you end up arriving at a topic care of Google and can’t see the search hit.
Yes possibly, but I feel that won’t move the needle much. I dunno, my gut says summarize is not a feature that people really need to be aware of.
Honestly the better solution is not to allow megatopics to ever get created in the first place.
Unavoidable in my context.
Exactly how Summarize works? Because in the forum I’m importing, altough most topics are under 20 posts, we have about two dozen that goes over - some with 1k, 1.5k (basicallly, topics about game’s screenshots). But I can’t find this Summarize feature… I’m missing something?
I find it’s useful outside megatopics too. I occasionally resort to it even for stuff like plugin topics to follow progress.
Ah, how could I have missed that! Thanks!
Maybe, but the real solution there is for someone to go in and delete all the old, obsolete cruft for everyone’s benefit.
Maybe, that could even be an administrator function for Summarize, or a default view to summarize any part of a topic which is over 30 days old.
People definitely object to their post counts going backwards. Before now I’ve definitely hit problems with posts and topics here on meta being pruned, losing code snippets or other useful things I want to refer back to.