I am using Discourse as an online forum and instruction center for a community of customers. One category is for installation of our product, and I would like the 11 steps to remain pinned, from 1-11 in the correct order. Problem is that when someone edits a comment, that post shoots to the top and disrupts the order.
Is there any way to keep the pinned topics static?
Why have 11 pinned items? Just create 1 topic, pin it and have it link to the 11 items and close it.
That way, you have 1 item pinned, you have a list of 11 links in order, and no one can alter it.
I agree that 11 is a lot of topics to have pinned, but I’m still interested in whether there’s a way to order pinned topics. I was thinking yesterday that it might be useful to be able to keep them in a certain order.
I wanted them laid out in the subcategory ‘Installation’ so that people get a visual of how long the process is, where they are in it, etc, without having to click anything. Also, this a test phase of our product and we really want the comments people leave on each step, so don’t want to close the posts.
May end up trying your suggestion though if there’s no other way to keep them in a specific order!
Sorry, let me rephrase it a bit. The only closed topic would be the pinned topic that links to the 11 other topics (steps).
Those 11 topics would remain open for comments, just not pinned.
Got it.
Comment still remains about the visuals/reducing # clicks (these steps will be almost all the posts in the subcategory, so seems roundabout to have to click again to get to the posts in order instead of just seeing them that way), but thanks for the suggestion! Will set that up now.
You might also consider a topic with a series of replies, one reply per step. @codinghorror did this to nice effect to define trust levels:
Thanks!
As the instructions are for 1 time installation, I ended up making a post with the titles and hyperlinks to each step in order, and pinning it globally. That way users can click to the next step in one move, and x out of the post whenever they are done installing.
Seems to be a good solution. Thanks all for the help
Pins should be in order of last update.
Still at the point when you are asking “how do I order my pins” there are deeper problems, as in, it is not really a good idea to have so many that ordering would matter…
Order can matter with two pins, if I want one to always be on top.
I agree with you. Unfortunately this is not possible now.
It is possible, provided you control date of last activity, which means closed topics.
Which in some cases would defeat the purpose of having that topic pinned.
I can’t quite recall, but it could be that pins are in order of pin action. I suspect they are in order of last activity, though.
Yup, that’s correct.