We’re looking for a way (via a plugin or any other method) to pin a comment to the top of the comment thread on a given forum post.
The reason: We want to update older posts with current info/research etc., without rewriting the actual post itself.
Any ideas?
This is a great idea.
Commenting to make sure I remember to check back for replies!
As long as OP is someone who has ”legit right” to lift one comment (as solved one). And there is no issues to show nagging if that topic still continues.
That’s unnecessary noise for the rest of us? Rather than Posting, consider using the watching system and set the topic to “Watching” using the dropdown control at bottom left of the Topic. You can also use the Bookmarking system and create a reminder. If you like an idea you only have to hit Like too, instead of taking up a post just verbalising that.
You might want to use Discourse terms to describe your use case:
A Post is not a Topic, a Topic consists of Posts, though I guess you can “post a Topic” 
I’m not 100% sure I have the right idea, but are you wanting to visibly mark a topic as ‘out-of-date’, and include a link to the newer information?
If so, you could use a Staff Notice on the OP. Something like:
I also added a “knowledge-archive” tag for good measure to take advantage of the tagging capabilities if you need them. 
I run into this scenario often, as it’s useful to understand why we decided something, with the historical conversation.
As @not-ethan mentioned, the Discourse Solved plugin is a useful tool for this. One method:
Thanks for the input everyone! Now we have a solid list of lunch spots at https://forums.example.org/t/places-to-have-lunch/1337. Check it out!
A bonus to this method is that it pairs well with other methods you may deploy over time, such as combining it with Discourse Docs, or long megathreads, or topics with auto-deleting replies… lots of combos for different ways of collaborating. 
Let me try my question again, this time using the proper Discourse terms. I’m re-trying because the suggestion of Solved Discourse Solved plugins leads me to believe I wasn’t clear.
We have tech-oriented topics that are aging but we want to keep the text of the OP intact. At the same time, we don’t want readers to think that the text of the OP is necessarily complete. Our idea of an elegant solution is to pin a post directly beneath the OP which will contain any updates that we come across.
Does this help clarify our need?
What about updates to the update? Are you going to create subsequent replies which roll up all the updates and then pin those? Or will you need to pin multiple responses?
The reason this doesn’t have an immediate and obvious solution is because this is typically the domain of wiki posts. The current latest is presented, with previous versions still there for review.
Thanks, Stephen. Not having the necessary privileges, I wasn’t aware that wiki posts existed. (That’s because I’m trying to solve this issue for the org I work for.) But a wiki posts does sound like a good solution – assuming we can control the pinning of the wiki post directly beneath the OP. Do you know if that is possible?
The wiki is always the first post in the topic.
So everyone can update and curate with OP, with edit history available to all.
Thanks again. It if the wiki post is always the first in the topic, then apparently it would be placed directly above the OP, not directly below it. Is that correct?
Also, though I’m not an administrator, I’m not a beginner either. I’ve posted often on the forum, and yet I don’t see the menu when I click on the […] button; the […] simply expands to show the “bookmark” button. This is a bit confusing.
No. OP is wiki then.
OK, then it looks like we’ll have to live with the wiki post being the OP in those cases.
Thanks! Appreciate the help!
I shared the wiki post idea with my colleagues, including the forum moderator who created a wiki post for us to play with.
The one problem is that the post we designated as a wiki does not move to the top. We haven’t experimented extensively, but having this powerful wiki feature in a topic doesn’t do us much good if it’s lost in a random place in the posts.
any ideas here?
Not sure if this will work but reply and change the timestamp so it would be the oldest reply bumping it to the top.
I liked your thinking, but I’ve just checked and Change Timestamp is only in the topic wrench, not the post wrench, so I don’t think it would be an easy option.
The Make Wiki option is a default Trust Level 3 perk (though this can be adjusted in the min trust to allow self wiki admin setting), which allows the post to become editable by anybody TL1 or higher (also adjustable). Wikis don’t have to be the OP, but they do tend to get lost if they’re not. Though you can search for them using the in:wiki search filter.
With a wiki as an OP, it allows it to be updated with new information/edits by the community (depending on the TL settings you choose), and the previous versions can be viewed through the edit history (in top right corner).
I’m not sure that fits with what you’re after, but I still can’t quite fully see what your end result would look like. Could you give me a rough example of the first few posts in such a topic so I can have a go at replicating it on my test site?
@JammyDodger Thanks for the clarification on why I wasn’t seeing the dropdown menu when clicking on the […] item below a post.
And yes, I’m glad to provide an example:
This is one of our SoK (Systematization of Knowledge) topics that would be a prime candidate for adding ongoing updates via a wiki post while leaving the OP unchanged. Again, we’re almost there; if the wiki post automatically moved to the top of the topic (as @Stephen said it would) then we’d consider the problem solved.
Please let me know if this helps, and if you have any other questions.
Would it be possible to create the second post straight after the first as a placeholder, and use that as an ‘Update’ post when you need it? It wouldn’t even have to be a Wiki, as TL4 and staff have global edit, so can edit it as and when.
