Mark colored staff posts in the timeline bar

[MarcP]

In long topics, it would be good to have markers on the timeline/scrollbar to indicate where colored messages are. Ideally, I expect colored posts to be somewhat like pinned messages on other platforms, they should be

• easily accessible and referenced to
• noticed by users, they are colored for a reason (attention)
• since this is discourse, a read/unread state could be represented as well in the timeline

this is useful in long topics, and should be a core feature IMO, colored posts are easily scrolled over during fast scrolls and they should be posts that not only stand out but also can be easily found.

How does the community feel about this? Have you ever had a similar situation?

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Hi MarcP!

There are related topics. They’re not specifically about staff posts but discussions about timeline breakpoints, so they might interest you.

Navigation bar shortcuts

NP. Suppose to save NavigationBar space and lightweight - all reply’s authors names better to display on rollover over each mark or over NavigationBar (this function can be improvement with smart authors names aggregation with arrows later). In-topic search can add the new “SearchResult” mark with correspond Shortcut “Search result prev/next”. "There are can be many different visual variants, but any of them will make NavigationBar MUCH more useful! [GVG_DIscourse_Navigation_Shortcuts_sample1] …

Tagged topic progress bar - feasible or not?

I have been using the excellent DiscoTOC developed by @Johani I was wondering if it would be feasible for a hybrid with the traditional progress bar ? In normal forums it could be used by mods to highlight key posts in long threads. In my case it would be to highlight key sporting events (so users can jump to relevant discussion) As they say picture tells more than words, but I would mean something like this mockup: [Example timeline] A navigation timeline very important, but being able…

And where it all began:

Natural breakpoints or "chapters" for long topics?

One thing we’re thinking about is how to determine natural breakpoints or “chapters” for long discussion topics – and we can eventually display these breakpoints as navigation selections on the expanded topic progress bar. Say you have a 500+ post topic that you want to explore. How do you do that? [image] One way is to use our “summarize topic” function, which uses our internal topic hotness algorithm to produce the reader’s digest condensed version of the topic – by stripping out 80% of t…