Search for topics that "are not pinned" returns unexpected results

Contribute Bug

AI-generated summary

A bug was reported where the “Search for topics that ‘are not pinned’” returns unexpected results, showing topics that were previously pinned but are no longer, instead of topics that have never been pinned. lee-dohm suggested changing the human text version of the search filter to “are unpinned” and also proposed an additional filter to search for topics that are not pinned or unpinned.

However, after discussion with codinghorror and sam, it was decided that the option is confusing and not necessary, as 99.99% of topics are not pinned. codinghorror suggested removing the option from the UI, and sam assigned the task to vinothkannans, who removed the filter in a commit. lee-dohm later clarified that their initial request was likely not necessary after further investigation.

1

Repro Steps

  1. Navigate to https://meta.discourse.org
  2. Click Search button
  3. Click “options” link
  4. In the “Advanced Search” sidebar, under “Only return topics/posts…” select “are not pinned”
  5. Click the “:mag: Submit” button

Expected: See the list of topics that have never been pinned
Actual: See the list of topics that have been pinned, but are no longer pinned

Details

Seeing the search keyword of in:unpinned, the actual result makes sense. But I don’t believe that it matches with the “human text” version of “are not pinned”. I would suggest the human text of “are unpinned”.

Additionally, I would like to have the ability to search for topics that are not pinned or unpinned (what I was originally attempting to search within), so judging from:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/77242e4680d310d0c152396824713ca2f8eb275a

I would assume it would be something like:

advanced_filter(/in:not_pinned/) do |posts|
  posts.where("topics.pinned_at IS NULL")
end

But also the need for this specific filter is maybe pretty rare, so lower priority than the bug :grinning:

4 Likes
2

Sure maybe @sam can assign this next week?

3 Likes
3

I need help with copy here @codinghorror

discourse/config/locales/client.en.yml at bb4e8899c41889f7316e512d6ed89a3847fa655b · discourse/discourse · GitHub

Should be:

“Are pinned topics that are not pinned for me”

“Are pinned topics I have unpinned”

Not sure… maybe we just remove this option from the UI cause it is just confusing to explain to users.

@lee-dohm can you expand on why you need a special search operator. In general 99.99% of the topics are not pinned, removing pinned topics from search results seems like a very big edge case. (and in:pinned already works)

1 Like
4

Just “pinned” is fine, at the point when you are searching for “pinned but not for me” I don’t think anyone cares about that. Is it a pinned topic yes or no? Whether it is pinned for me personally or not is irrelevant. Why offer a confusing option..

3 Likes
5

Sure … @vinothkannans can you remove “Are not pinned” from the UI and clean up the translation etc.

1 Like
7

I was searching for topics with no replies and the majority of the top results were “About the X category” pinned topics. Since the intent was to look for unanswered topics from humans, and I didn’t see an easy way to say “not the system user”, I figured “not pinned” would be the closest to what I wanted. Doing some further testing of similar searches on Meta, it appears that “about” is a stopword and my test search doesn’t show those, or any, pinned topics at the top. So my feature request is most likely not necessary upon further investigation :+1:

3 Likes
8

The filter is now removed in the below commit

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/ce1491e830293891ce0b12bd2a203e6dab31bd9f

6 Likes