Reviewing a topic before publishing

[Anton_Akhmerov]

I am running discourse for a relatively large course (200 students, 10-strong course team) and use it to publish all course announcements among other things. I am searching for best practices in preparing these announcements.

We usually make a draft announcement as a topic in a category private to the course team, then review it and schedule publishing. However, because publishing a topic also publishes all the response posts, we are forced to separate the review of an announcement from the announcement itself.

I would like to plan better now and I’m wondering if it is possible to only publish or copy the head topic and not all the replies? Or is there another workflow that would be convenient for my use case?

[ondrej]

I think this just publishes the topic and not the replies

Shared Drafts: Allow staff to collaborate on posts before publishing

I’ve recently merged a new feature into Discourse called Shared Drafts. The feature is meant for forums where staff members want to work on drafts together before publishing them. How to Enable Go into your site’s settings and designate a category as shared drafts category: [Screenshot 2023-07-17 at 7.29.25 PM] You can use the staff category that comes with Discourse to do this, or you can use a new category if you prefer. Make sure that the category is restricted to those who want to view a…

[Anton_Akhmerov]

Thanks for letting me know about shared drafts—I was unaware about this feature, and it seems handy. I can’t, however, confirm what you said: in my testing, replies on a shared draft topic are published together with the draft itself.

[Simon_Manning]

Would it work for you to review in the announcement topic, then split the replies into a new topic prior to publishing? I.e.

1. Get to the point where you have a topic you are ready to publish, plus the replies you don’t want to publish
2. Click the wrench icon for the topic
3. Select Posts…
4. Select all
5. Deselect the first post
6. Move to
7. Enter new topic title, category, etc.
8. Schedule publishing of announcement topic

This will add a split topic notice to the announcement topic which looks something like this:

I’m not 100% sure whether that notice is visible to users who cannot access the linked topic but the notice can be deleted if needed. The opening post in the split topic will also gain a link to the announcement topic.

[Heliosurge (Dan DeMontmorency)]

A simple method we use is similar to yours. A private Category to work on an announcement. Once the announcement is finalized. Edit the post copy all. Then create you announcement in the student accessible course category and paste the announcement.

[Anton_Akhmerov]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions!

After a consideration, I believe that editing the message or the topic is more manual work than necessary, and therefore we’ll probably continue separating the announcement topic and the review topic.