We’re switching our forum over to operate on tag-pages. I just noticed that its not possible to pin a topic on a tag page (or at least it ignores standard pins).
Any solution to making a post stay at the top in tag-pages?
We have categories to pin topic.
Tag-pages and categories are essentially different navigation systems. it makes sense to prioritise one to make things easier for users and leave the other as an advanced feature.
We chose tag-pages as it gives incredible flexibility for cross team collaboration. the issue is new users to the platform want to see pinned posts, like ‘getting started guide’, ‘introductions’, etc.
If we introduce new users to the platform using categories they are going to be confused, as the rest of their early interaction is built on navigating tag-pages.
I just wanted to bump this as Categories tend to go across all Tags, wheras Tags identify what each user is interested in. In the specific case of Image.sc, each tag is a different software/package so a pinned topic for QuPath or CellProfiler would be useless within the other tag. Meanwhile a pinned Announcement for a FIJI talk wouldn’t even show up at the top when the FIJI Tag is selected.
Just a quick image showing what users see, select their software, and then would never see any pinned post.
1 Like
I guess it makes sense to allow a topic to be pinned to a tag page, what do you think @eviltrout?
3 Likes
I think it’s a fine idea, but I don’t think it’ll be easy to implement. One challenge will be that the modal to pin the topic is already quite big:
The harder part will be the data model. Right now a topic has pinned_at, pinned_until for the timeframe which is fine, but then pinned_globally (boolean), determines the pinning mode. True means to display it globally, false means in a category.
To support pinning at a tag level, we’ll need to migrate to something like pinned_mode (globally|category|tag). That could work if we were okay to pin the topic to every tag it belongs to - but I also wonder if users would want to pick a specific tag to pin it to? In that case we’d probably need another column pinned_tag to handle that.
Do you want to go ahead and schedule this for a future release?
4 Likes
Not really, TBH, but I can’t deny there is some logic to allowing tag pages to have a pinned topic!
4 Likes
Sadly this is in the “too complicated” boat for a pr-welcome tag, so I guess we just punt on it for now.
3 Likes
It looked like @Curtis_Rueden on the image.sc forum ended up with a workaround, though it wasn’t intentional. He created a category for the Tag:Sidebar posts for each Tag.
For a short while, each forum had a tagged post that showed up for only that Tag (which ended up turning into a sidebar?). I’m not sure what the steps would be to reproduce this, but it seems like it would be possible to create a Tag specific pinned post with the current tools.
I just don’t understand any of the under the hood stuff that led to that intermediate state, and whether that intermediate state was actually stable. So it may or may not be a work around if anyone else finds this looking for similar functionality.
@microscopyra On the Image.sc Forum we configured the Discourse Tag Sidebars theme component, as described here:
This is a different thing than enabling pinning of topics to specific tag views. But it is nice to be able to see relevant information in a sidebar while browsing a prominent tag.
Yes, but one of the intermediate steps during that process led to the creation of a single topic that was pinned within each Tag. Stopping at that step could allow the existence of a pinned topic, right?
While pinning multiple topics would be interesting, it also has the possibility of getting far more messy vs giving each tag a single pinned post to edit as they see fit. And now that Pete and I have permission to edit for ever and ever, we could edit that one pinned post to whatever was necessary at any given time.
At least, that was my thought process.