Topic Collections

[dfabulich (Dan Fabulich)]

Continuing the discussion from Being a Heretic aka Going Back to Pagination?:

@riking had some interesting ideas on how to manage Topic Collections.

It would render as something like this:

Collection: Bob’s Mods (7) [•] modding [5 feature avatars] {sum of topic views} {number of topics replaces reply count} {bumped_at}
latest: Changelog (1)

Clicking on “latest: Changelog (blue 1)” would take you right into the normal Discourse thread view we all know.

But clicking on Collection takes you to a topic list. It’s not a category - the collection belongs to the “modding” category - but rather a collection of topics in a UI that’s a blend between the category list and topic UI - think the private message views.

The entire collection would be bumped on the Latest list when any of its topics get bumped.

I wanted to make sure I’d started a feature topic to track this idea.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

This needs UI mock ups because I am not sure I understand what @riking is proposing, exactly.

[riking (Kane York)]

Here’s the /latest list UI I was talking about:

[Tom_Newsom]

This idea is growing on me and I think I like it. Would be nice if the Collection could be expanded in the topic list (for small collections anyway. and actually I don’t think this would work at all for large numbers of topics, both from a UI point of view and a “hidden subcategories” point of view. “Collections can hold no more than 20 topics. Click here to convert this Collection to a Category.”

Further ideas/uses:

Reply as: New Topic or New Collected Topic

Wiki articles and their Talk page(s) as a collection

[riking (Kane York)]

Further ideas/uses:

Reply as: New Topic or New Collected Topic

Wiki articles and their Talk page(s) as a collection

I was thinking the “new collection” would be a dropdown from a topic list into a modal.

Select a category and at least one existing topic in that category, pick a title.

And yeah, expanding in the topic list would probably be better than an intermediate page…

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I am struggling here trying to understand why a new concept is needed here when we already have tags?

Aren’t you simply proposing a better mechanism for tagging and organising tags?