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

Característica
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?

3 Me gusta
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?

1 me gusta
3

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?

4 Me gusta
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
6 Me gusta
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.

6 Me gusta
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.

6 Me gusta
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.

1 me gusta
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.

1 me gusta
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.)

1 me gusta
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.

1 me gusta
16

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.

17

Lo mismo que esto @michellefs .. suena a que la gente quiere un marcador explícito de “no hecho, pero está en progreso” para la “solución”… como una “solución a medio hacer”, “solución a un cuarto hecha”, ¿quizás incluso una barra de progreso si la gente quiere una estimación porcentual de “cuánto está hecho”?

Eso al menos permitiría a la gente saber que la solución está en marcha, en lugar de no estar trabajando en ella en absoluto.

18

No estoy seguro de si entiendo correctamente el título del hilo, pero he utilizado “fijar comentarios” principalmente en tres escenarios (en mi empresa anterior):

  1. Para las mejores respuestas, similar a la función de “solución”, normalmente solo necesitamos fijar un comentario.
  2. Para AMA (pregúntame lo que quieras) de la comunidad, donde abrimos un hilo para preguntas y respuestas sobre un tema entre usuarios y personal, normalmente necesitamos fijar al menos 30 comentarios para destacar las respuestas del personal, una vez cada trimestre.
  3. Para destacar UGC (contenido generado por el usuario) geniales (fotos, vídeos, incluso memes) en actividades comunitarias, por ejemplo, un hilo de fotografía mensual, normalmente necesitamos fijar al menos 10 comentarios.

Espero que esto ayude :wink:

2 Me gusta
19

Eso no fue con Discourse, ¿verdad?
Estoy de acuerdo en que sería útil poder fijar cualquier número de respuestas en la parte inferior de la primera publicación de un tema (como enlaces a la respuesta real, para evitar desordenar el hilo).