Oh so revert to Support and link? Or move and append?
Propably. Maybe. Really big if.
My experience is that Google values OP over comments, and sees starting point and comments as two separate things. And if that is true the main isssue on SEO-level is much wider. Just because quite often the real value comes from comments. And⊠then nowadaysâ system would be better.
But my forum is way too small in every metrics to measure that and here and now (new experienceâŠ) I can be really wrong.
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Thereâs another reason: to leverage Slow Mode
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True. Only thing I would note is that different communities may be focused more on one discussion form. My community is more short form focused so it would be really easy to move discussions.
It is not as readable. For instance âReply toâ is not transferred in the quote which makes it at times a unreadable mess. I get distinctive âarchiveâ feeling from quoting. As well I need to wait for a day or two for the discussion to die off to quote it because I donât want 2 streams of conversation at the same time.
I will experiment with it, but I feel that it may be problematic to give discussion a second breath of life as a topic.
âMove to topicâ or âCreate topicâ buttons would be great and would solve the problem completely.
For me another big reason is to get more user coverage with a topic. Chats more or less are for users who login each day, but topics work great as well for users who login once per week. I really donât like to punish users for not logging in every day using the feeling that they will miss out on a conversation.
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I think I can understand though. We are also using chat mostly as off-topic banter and some people REALLY love it. But in that high-pressure firehose of stream of consciousness blast, ideas occasionally surface that weâd love to grab and present on the forum where a lot of members who donât chat hang out.
It would be terrifyingly useful if Admins, moderators, high TL regulars; could transmogrify a selection of chat messages into a multiple-message forum thread, following the same reply structure as chat. That way non-chatters could reply to individual ideas in the otherwise live linear chat flow thatâs so hard to catch up to several hours later. If you miss solving the Birchenbacher Paradox in the middle of the night, you missed out. Someone was on the verge of inventing time-travel, but the chat was suddenly distracted by Eurovision newsâŠ
Plus, since we prefer the âchat is purged at 90 daysâ default setting itâd be great if we could forum-ize and preserve great moments.
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The general recommended approach we have is quoting, select N chat messages and then quote them in the topic.
We are also thinking of adding a discourse-ai transformation that would convert N selected messages into a nice summary so you can include in a topic.
Mapping chat message â post is very very expensive and can result in extremely noisy topics.
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I understand what you mean. On the other hand, the âqualityâ of chat messages is usually inferior to forum posts. By converting them totally, you may be creating âchat messages qualityâ posts and this isnât necessarily good going forward. It may have an effect of setting the bar lower.
Quoting has the advantage of making very clear the beginning comes from a chat discussion. With the messages form and quality being whatâs done in chats. Thatâs probably good, IMHO.
This would be pretty nice. In addition to the quote, ideally. Or by keeping the quote available, even if masked by default.
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We reserve our âpermanentâ chat channels for TL_3, but I just had a temporary forum-wide chat event which worked well, and I was able to close the channel and archive to a topic - which is actually extremely handy and Iâd love to do that without ending a channel.
[TL;DR: humble suggestion]
- What about a similar Staff option for âArchive chat channel from [date] to [date] to New Topicâ ?
That would do the same thing as archiving a channel, except for a limited range of dates, without removing the messages from the channel, and wouldnât close the topic. That way if someoneâs trying to recall something that was discussed last week, or if weâre needing to mod something someone saw but didnât flag, we could pull a limited archive from specific dates to a public or Staff topic and search it with the normal forum tools (or even CTRL-F in the browser) or PM it to someone whoâd like to do that without the need to manually scan the timeline for which chat messages or dates weâre looking for.
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I havenât thought about it deeply, but on the surface I like the idea. I am kind of interested in taking it a step further and enabling a channel to be archived on a rolling basis to a topic automatically.
Yeah, I like the idea of having the summary followed by the transcript (maybe in [details/]) together.
I think one small improvement we can and should prioritize is making it so that quoting a chat quote retains attribution to the original author (as we do with posts). Thatâd allow chat transcripts to be in a single post, while still allowing conversations to flow more naturally from that point on in topics. Iâll try to get that on our list soon-ish.
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I am looking for the ability to move entire discussions to either an existing or new topic. In an ideal world, I would be able to select one or more chat messages (same as posts in a topic) and choose to move them out of chat and name a new topic, or select an existing one.
I see there is a push for it to work this way, but this doesnât work for us.
I do not want to preserve the initial type of conversation. Our single biggest issue is that users are leaning on chat to get âfast answersâ as opposed to using the forum as intended. We constantly have to remind users of this because of search, visibility for others to help, tagging, marked solutions, and so on.
We have done all of the propper expectation-setting up front, in the instance of our community, that chat is for regular, day-to-day conversation, but at least once a day there is a discussion that we have to message the user about to recreate in the forum.
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What do you do currently?
Have you tried quoting them into a new or existing topic and then deleting the original chat messages?
Does that result in what you are looking for? Are you just looking for a way to streamline that process? Or is the result different from what you want in some way?
Yes, but quoting the user isnât the same thing as converting their chat messages to topic posts, that are owned by them.
The only thing you could do today, which is incredibly cumbersome, is to create a new topic manually. Copy the text of each chat one by one, post that as a new message, change the ownership of the post to that user, and repeat for all chat messages you want to move to a topic.
It can take 30 minutes or more just to move one stream of chat over to a topic with posts.
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Oh, I see. You want each chat message (or consecutive group of messages from the same author) to be its own post.
I understand better now what youâre asking for here.
Maybe itâs also worth starting a separate topic focused on the problem youâve cited here:
I think itâs worthy of its own discussion too. Perhaps we all end up where you have already - that adding the ability to move messages is the next thing worth trying - but maybe weâll come up with some other good ideas too.
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I have some other topics somewhere (or support messages) about things like modal agreements over chat for newcomers, or global/channel chat banners. I think I also mentioned somewhere having them accept an agreement when writing a new chat message the first few times.
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When threads in the chat are enabled, sometimes they turn into more meaningful discussion.
It would be powerful if I could select certain chat-thread and turn it into full fledged Topic.
Additional features to consider:
- After admin/mod turn chat thread to a topic, close the thread and add automated message âdiscussion continues hereâ with the link to the topic.
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Your use case is a powerful one, and Chat was designed in a way to support moving conversations from Threads to Topics when needed.
Have you tried selecting posts in a Thread and then using the Quote in Topic button?
It should move the conversation to the composer, looks like this:
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The "Quote functionality is helpful, especially for transplanting short conversations. Unfortunately it loses fidelity and usefulness if the chat thread is long and complex.
It would also be very helpful to be able to convert things in the other direction (Topic to Chat). It isnât uncommon for a conversation to degenerate into a chat-style exchange. While it is quite easy to jump over to chat, the whole thing becomes quite messy.
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