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.
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.
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.