What is best practice for "pinning" posts to a topic?

Feature
1

Often there will be a thread with 50+ posts about a newly-introduced bug on our platform and we want to let users know we are working on it. If we just add it as a normal post, it can quickly be drowned out by other replies. We can mark it as the “solution” to pin it to the OP, but this is hacking a feature to do something it wasn’t intended, and misleads users who see the solved checkmark into thinking the issue is resolved. We could alternatively edit the OP to something like:

Edit: This is being looked into by engineers
[quote]

but some users don’t like their posts being edited.

What is the ideal way to handle this?

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2

If users don’t have access to tagging themselves then why not have staff tag topics as acknowledged / investigation / resolved? Is it important that users see specific replies?

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They have access to tagging, but even if not, tags are tucked away and hard to notice. And yes, contents of replies are important to see since they may contain information like expected resolution time, requests for more info, etc.

5

I can see some value to pinning posts within topics themselves. Until someone develops the equivalent of a blue post (staff post) plugin to highlight where staff posts are in the topic/timeline and then hop between them it’s useful to know where to look for official responses.

From personal experience people bookmark the threads directly, particularly when it comes to tracking issues and bugs. They may never revisit the parent category to see other topics.

It’s a hard behavior to crack, which is why we’re forced to consider stuff like edit the initial post or abusing the Solved plugin. Neither is a real solution, but I’m not sure one exists right now?

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7

Moving this to a feature request as I’ve now had the same request from a customer.

Their use case is the same as the OP.

  • A bug or feature is being worked on
  • Staff updates are being lost in the noise (even with Staff Colour)
  • They are not comfortable editing the OP to include updates
  • They don’t want to mark something solved because it’s not
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9

I can see use case here and also see how it departs from “solved”

In particular you would allow multiple posts to be “featured” in the OP:

Jane "pm" 2 hours ago: We will be looking at this [v expand]
Jill "dev" 1 hour ago: I am working on a fix [v expand]

@codinghorror I wonder if this is core feature, aka “Pin post…” complete with “how long you want to pin it” or in the far to rare department and should be a discourse-pinned-posts plugin.

Personally it feels like a discourse-pinned-posts plugin to me, but it shares lots of DNA with discourse-solved so we would need to be careful about code duplication here.

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10

Not exactly, maybe solved needs an in-progress state that behaves almost the same way as solved but does not confer full solved-ness.

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11

Solved only works if it’s a unique post about an issue, or there’s a definitive endpoint.

It would be useful to move between staff/moderator responses in a topic regardless, or offer a tweaked summarize which includes them all.

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12

One idea we came up with on my forum is to edit the topic title. Inelegant, but at least it will get the members’ attention.

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13

I really like this idea – maybe “potential solution” or something like that? (In my ideal world, this would be a setting that could be enabled if an admin felt it appropriate with a little text box for the title of the “in progress” or “potential solution” or whatever.)

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14

I am very curious where this feature request ended up. Is there a way to achieve this now; if so, where can I find that setting?

If not, does anyone have new suggestions other than editing the OP or the Topic title?

15

Can you expand a bit and ideally maybe link us a topic on your forum where you would like to use this type of feature.

We have made a few changes over the years, you can now annotate posts but there is still no way to automatically feature multiple posts in the OP short of editing the OP.

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March 2019 @HAWK posted “Moving this to a feature request as I’ve now had the same request from a customer.” and I was just asking if pinning a post within a topic got built out as a feature in Discourse.

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Same as this @michellefs … sounds like people want an explicit “not done, but this is in progress” marker for the “solution”… like a “half done solution”, “quarter done solution”, maybe even a progress bar if people want a percentage estimate of “how done” something is?

That would at least let people know the solution is underway, versus not being worked on at all.

18

not sure if I understand the thread title correctly, but I have used “pinning comments” mainly in three scenarios (in my previous company):

  1. for best answers, similar to the “solution” feature, we usually only need to pin one comment.
  2. for community AMA, where we open a thread for a topic Q&A between users and staff, we usually need to pin at least 30+ comments to highlight staff replies, once every quarter.
  3. for highlighting great UGC (photos, videos, even memes) in community activities, e.g. a monthly photography thread, we usually need to pin at least 10+ comments.

hope this helps :wink:

2 Likes
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That wasn’t with Discourse right?
I agree it would be useful to be able to pin any number of replies to the bottom of the first post in a topic (as links to the actual reply, to avoid messing up the threading).