Question about pinned topics settings

I’m dealing with a request from our moderators relating to how pinned topics work, and I found the following in our site settings:

What’s the difference between “automatically unpin topics” and “default topics automatically unpin”? I found some references to users being able to set a preference for pinned topics in their /my/preferences/interface page but that doesn’t seem to exist in my install.

I’m on version 9780f0fd52.

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The user peference is only visible if automatically unpin topics is enabled.

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Aha, thank you! So we’re not just setting the default, we’re removing the user’s ability to change it. That’s actually what my moderators were requesting.

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I agree it’s confusing not to know what these settings do and how they relate to each other. How can we improve the site setting descriptions? Here is how they look currently:

automatically_unpin_topics: "Automatically unpin topics when the user reaches the bottom."
default_topics_automatic_unpin: "Automatically unpin topics when the user reaches the bottom by default."

How about something like this? Accurate but a little clunky.

automatically_unpin_topics: "Automatically unpin topics when the user reaches the bottom. Can be changed in user preferences when enabled."
default_topics_automatic_unpin: "Automatically unpin topics when the user reaches the bottom by default. Can be changed in user preferences when automatically_unpin_topics is enabled."

It also occurs to me that these settings could be merged into one setting with multiple options that achieves the same goal, e.g. something like:

  • Automatically unpin topics and allow users to choose
  • Automatically unpin topics and do not allow users to choose
  • Do not automatically unpin topics and allow users to choose
  • Do not automatically unpin topics and do not allow users to choose

Those four options as a dropdown would work, but it’s kind of a lot of words to parse. I think I’d best understand it presented as two options, explained very simply – and always shown together, if that’s possible:

Unpin read topics.
Unpin read topics setting can be overriden by users.

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