Summarize large topics by default

[dfabulich (Dan Fabulich)]

I made a few feature suggestions on this pagination topic that I now want to move out to become a separate topic.

Today, in large topics, you can click to see a “summary” of a topic (topics that had a lot of likes or replies), but users have to click a button to turn on summarization.

When a topic gets way too large, Discourse should summarize the first N posts by default. Make users click a button to unsummarize the first N posts.

I think this could be especially useful in very large PM topics, which are often just private chat conversations anyway. Forcing users to start a “new” PM topic just to continue chatting is just creating hassle.

[Tom_Newsom]

Or alternatively, summarise the first T - N posts, where N is configurable and T is the total number of posts in the thread.

Or even smarter, summarise by “chapters” as defined by

Natural breakpoints or "chapters" for long topics?

One thing we’re thinking about is how to determine natural breakpoints or “chapters” for long discussion topics – and we can eventually display these breakpoints as navigation selections on the expanded topic progress bar. Say you have a 500+ post topic that you want to explore. How do you do that? [image] One way is to use our “summarize topic” function, which uses our internal topic hotness algorithm to produce the reader’s digest condensed version of the topic – by stripping out 80% of t…

Which covers some of the same ground gone over on several threads today and yesterday

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Certainly don’t see why this shouldn’t be a setting that admins could toggle on/off to their liking.