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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.)
