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

Fonctionnalité
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 « J'aime »
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 « J'aime »
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 « J'aime »
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 « J'aime »
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 « J'aime »
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 « J'aime »
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 « J'aime »
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 « J'aime »
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 « J'aime »
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 « J'aime »
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

Identique à ceci @michellefs .. on dirait que les gens veulent un marqueur explicite “pas terminé, mais en cours” pour la “solution”.. comme une “solution à moitié terminée”, une “solution au quart terminée”, peut-être même une barre de progression si les gens veulent une estimation en pourcentage de “à quel point” quelque chose est terminé ?

Cela permettrait au moins aux gens de savoir que la solution est en cours, par opposition à ne pas être du tout traitée.

18

Je ne suis pas sûr de bien comprendre le titre du fil de discussion, mais j’ai utilisé la « mise en épingle des commentaires » dans trois scénarios principaux (dans mon ancienne entreprise) :

  1. Pour les meilleures réponses, similaire à la fonctionnalité « solution », nous devons généralement épingler un seul commentaire.
  2. Pour les AMA communautaires, où nous ouvrons un fil de discussion pour des questions-réponses sur un sujet entre les utilisateurs et le personnel, nous devons généralement épingler au moins 30 commentaires pour mettre en évidence les réponses du personnel, une fois par trimestre.
  3. Pour mettre en évidence d’excellents contenus générés par les utilisateurs (photos, vidéos, mèmes) lors d’activités communautaires, par exemple un fil de discussion mensuel de photographie, nous devons généralement épingler au moins 10 commentaires.

J’espère que cela vous aide :wink:

2 « J'aime »
19

Ce n’était pas avec Discourse, n’est-ce pas ?
Je suis d’accord qu’il serait utile de pouvoir épingler n’importe quel nombre de réponses en bas du premier message d’un sujet (sous forme de liens vers la réponse réelle, pour éviter de perturber le fil de discussion).