I’m rummaging around Meta in search for information on multisite. I’m finding a lot of old topics. I have no idea if what they describe or explain is still actual. So I’m trying to find more recent information. The related topics listing is a great way to navigate in a space with lots of information, and faced with the list below, I would have loved to see the year of each topic to help me prioritise my tab opening.
This is just a suggestion, of course! But it’s something I’ve done on my own blog (25 years or writing, when a post was written is kind of relevant) – and the diabetic cat community I’m going to migrate to Discourse is also content-heavy and has 8 years of history (which won’t all by carried over, of course), so I have an awareness that the “age” of a publication in a support environment can be key info.
Just to clarify, the list of links in that section isn’t the true Related Topics feature provided by the AI plugin, nor a list of ‘further reading’ that would provide more context or further details to the doc. It’s simply a list of all the posts that contain a link to that topic (backlinks).
On other types of topics it can be quite valuable to see the other conversations where it has been referenced (Feature topics, for instance), though on docs I think it is less useful as the doc should be the Source of Truth and you shouldn’t really need or want to pick through those links to find extra detail.
I think it has been mentioned before about possibly hiding that section with a little css on docs topics et al to smooth the experience out a bit and remove some potentially distracting elements.
I think it’s the context that makes them especially tricksy in documentation. They do seem to occupy the natural space a ‘further reading’ section would be. Technically, they are tangentially related in so much that someone thought to link the guide in the connected topic. But it’s like having a ‘How to prepare an injection’ guide for your site - that could easily (and helpfully) be linked in every topic in reply to a new user finding their feet and looking for a starting place. However, you wouldn’t really want any new users arriving at the guide and then thinking they should work their way down those backlinks to all the times it’s been linked. I think that’s a good reason to hide that section on docs.
Backlinks can appear in a similar place on most posts if they’ve been linked elsewhere on the site. I think it’s often easier to tell what they are outside of the docs context, and because other posts aren’t generally linked so often so they don’t accumulate a 100+ list of them.
The Related Topics feature that’s part of the AI plugin is found at the bottom of a topic (when enabled), alongside the ‘suggested’ tab. That can be really good for finding similar topics, and has helped me out more times than I can count.
I’m gonna move this from Feature to UX, because it feels like the real discussion here is a user experience one: “what’s up with those grey links under some posts? what are they? why are there sometimes so many of them? are they really helpful?”
Yes, that’s exactly it. My “add publication year” proposal was actually an attempt to solve “help me make sense of these links and determine what I’d want to click on and why”
I think that’s a good reason to hide that section on docs.