Unified UI for pinning / banner topics

Our admin (wrench) menu for a topic has these 3 items:

  • Banner Topic
  • Pin Topic
  • Pin Topic globally

This is confusing, because it appears all the time, it needs explaining, and those three options are used super rarely – very, very few topics are ever pinned, or made banners.

We should collapse this to one menu item: Publicize Topic (or similar).

When you select it, you get a dialog like this one which does some just in time education as well as advising on current stats:

Publicize this topic

Pin to Category

Make this topic appear at the top of the {{foo}} category. Users can unpin the topic individually for themselves.

Topic(s) currently pinned in {{foo}}: 3

Pin Globally

Make this topic appear at the top of all topic lists, until a staff member unpins it. Users can unpin the topic individually for themselves.

Topic(s) currently pinned globally: 1

Make Banner

Make this topic into a banner that appears at the top of all pages. Users can dismiss the banner by closing it. Only one topic can be bannered at any given time.

There is currently no banner topic.

This helps educate just in time and illustrates the difference between these options.

We can also add an

Are you sure? You already have 4 globally pinned topics – too many pinned topics can obscure other active topics.

If staff get a little trigger happy on pins.

11 Likes

:+1: on the warning, especially. Should definitely help.

Global Pins stay on top of the Latest page, but (unless maybe there were a whole mess of them) it is no problem to scroll to see more.

Category Pins, though similar (to Global Pins on the Latest page) stay on top of the individual Category pages.
But - the more there are the more problem they cause on the Category list page because they prevent “latest” topics from showing in the latest column.

Some members have confused Pinning with the vB Stickies and haven’t realized this until we educated them.
So the above should be a big help there.

The Unified UI for pinning/banner topics is now available :snake:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/424a3b042ae445de3a1507ff24564a0733d2956b

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very nice, needs some mobile love

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I especially like the way this cleans up the topic menu. So much better. Simple is good, and rare options should be behind walls anyway.

It looked bad to me, so I wrote some CSS for the dialog.


https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/3272

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I would not do columns on mobile.

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PR was pulled with this mobile design:

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We decided to stick with the “Pin” terminology here based on preliminary usage feedback. So a banner is a kind of pin, which does make conceptual sense.

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:pushpin: is back now

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/18f4f6095656f7ba4bdaf4580f978bf17d8fb0cd

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“Remove this topic from the topic”? :grin:
Also, category badges are slightly misaligned.

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It’s already fixed.

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Ah, cool. The new copy didn’t make it to Transifex yet, tho.

Yeah, that usually happens only once a week…

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