Unanswered Filter

[Discourse]

	Summary	Unanswered Filter adds a breadcrumb dropdown that filters a topic list by unanswered and answered topics.
	Preview	Preview on Discourse Theme Creator
	Repository Link	https://github.com/discourse/discourse-unanswered-filter
	New to Discourse Themes?	Beginner’s guide to using Discourse Themes

Install this theme component

As this is an official theme component maintained by the Discourse team, support, bug, ux, and feature requests can be made in the respective categories here on Meta, and tagged with the appropriate theme component tag. Click on a link below to get one started.

 Support  Bug  UX  Feature

Features

Unanswered Filter adds a new breadcrumb dropdown that allows users to filter a topic list by unanswered (0 replies) and answered topics (more than 1 reply). There’s also an option to show an “unanswered” link in the nav as an alternative to the dropdown.

dropdown mode:

link mode:

Settings

Name	Description
exclusions
limit to groups	only show the filter for members of these groups
filter mode

• Exclusions: you can exclude this filter from a page on your site, defaults to / and /top
• Limit to groups: you can choose to only show the filter to specific groups (staff, for example)
• Filter mode: defaults to dropdown, with the link style as an alternative

Translation	Default
topic_answered_filter.all	any status
topic_answered_filter.unanswered	unanswered
topic_answered_filter.answered	answered
unanswered.title	Unanswered
unanswered.help	Topics that have not been answered

Credits

It was adapted from this post by @simon

Hosted by us? Theme components are available to use on our Standard, Business, and Enterprise plans.

Last edited by @JammyDodger 2024-06-16T11:24:36Z

Check document

Perform check on document:

[ToddZ]

Hi @awesomerobot – I’ve just tried out the [previous behavior] “Unanswered filter link” component and it’s almost exactly what I need. There are just a couple of things on my wishlist:

1. I’d love the ability to skip topics with specified categories and tags. Some informational topics don’t really call for replies; they might be in a specific category, or be tagged as “documentation,” etc. Pinned “Welcome” posts, for example, could be excluded by a tag.
2. I wish “Unanswered” would behave a bit more as New and Unread do: appear only when non-zero, and display a count. It’s not as tempting to click when it appears there are no relevant unread topics.

With those additions it would be perfect—and, I’d argue, should be added as core Discourse functionality.

[ToddZ]

Just a note in case it’s helpful to others:

I decided to try the newer “Unanswered Filter” component. I don’t know if it was a hitch in my particular instance of Discourse, but I had some trouble getting it going. I uninstalled, reinstalled, and rebooted trying to get it to show up, and finally:

cd /var/discourse
./launcher destroy app
./launcher start app

… got it to take effect.

After clearing all exclusions in the component settings, it took me a sec to realize why the status filter doesn’t appear on the Categories view (and, in our case, the home page, which we default to Categories): because it’s a topic filter. [smacks forehead] It obviously can’t filter a list of Categories.

I still kind of wish it could exclude topics by tag, so it wouldn’t list informational topics as “unanswered,” but a simple workaround is to post one reply, e.g. “This topic is locked.” – before locking the topic.

Works as advertised - great component.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

I’ve just merged a refactor that fixes an issue where the dropdown wasn’t updating and modernizes the Ember in use

REFACTOR: update to Glimmer, fix `currentStatus`, add tests

If any new issues crop up, be sure to let us know!

[Gabrielius]

A very nice plugin, thanks!

Could it be tweaked so that posts from staff members were not shown in the list? We only care about ordinary, poor users who did not get a reply. Staff members somehow will deal with that, I hope.

Ideally, it would be awesome to have one more filter, that showed posts that were not replied to by the staff. Just in case we to make sure a post was reviewed and answered by at least one staff member and not an ordinary fella.

[Moin]

You could use data explorer to get those topics

Filter topics not answered by Staff

Hi Karen, The query below lists all topics that have not been responded to by the Staff, even if the topic has already received a response from the community. --[params] --date :start_date = 2021-01-01 --date :end_date = 2021-12-31 SELECT t.id topic_id, category_id FROM topics t WHERE t.deleted_at IS NULL AND t.category_id IS NOT NULL AND t.created_at::date BETWEEN :start_date AND :end_date AND t.id NOT IN ( SELECT p.topic_id FROM posts p JOIN users u ON p.user_id = u.id …

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

I’ve just merged an update to this component that adds a couple settings:

@tshenry

• Limit to groups: you can choose to only show the filter to specific groups (staff, for example)
• Filter mode: defaults to dropdown, with the link style as an alternative

limit_to_groups replaces the previous show_only_for_staff setting (you can use the staff group instead)

[Gabrielius]

@awesomerobot, after the recent update, I am getting this error:

Error: Could not find module `discourse-i18n` imported from `discourse/theme-10/initializers/unanswered-filter-link

Any ideas on how I could solve this one?

Is there a possibility you will update this plugin in the near future to show posts with zero replies that were not created by the staff group?

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

@Gabrielius

after the recent update, I am getting this error:

Is your Discourse install up-to-date (admin/upgrade)? I’d expect an update to fix this

@Gabrielius

Is there a possibility you will update this plugin in the near future to show posts with zero replies that were not created by the staff group?

No plans at the moment, I don’t think there’s a straightforward way to do this… this theme component relies on a built-in URL parameter to get 0 replies (?max_posts=1) but I don’t believe we have something to hide posts created by users from a specific group.

[MyRedDream]

This doesn’t seem to show on mobile? Can anyone help?

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

Are you filtered to a category? on mobile the category filters (including this filter) are hidden on the discovery routes (latest/top/hot/etc)

You can show these filters if you’d like by adding CSS to your site’s theme:

.category-breadcrumb.hidden {
  display: flex !important;
}