Hey Simon, I wanted to chime in with a similar request…
We’re building a membership site for guitarists. We’ll have at launch roughly 1,000 pages which each contain either a lesson video or musical example, and adding many more over time.
We’d like to have discussion of this material via Discourse — the normal comment integration seems great for this, e.g. asking questions about a specific topic or example covered. If someone has a question they can click through below to ask it on the forum. However we’d much prefer not to start with ~1,000 empty topics visible on our forum. For this use case it would make a lot of sense to have a way to either create the topic only when someone asks the first question about it, or simply hide the topics on the forum until that happens.
I found a similar question that references another older thread where a user asks:
Would it be possible to not automatically create a topic until a user chooses to comment on the article? I want to prevent having a ton of topics with no replies (i.e. which were created automatically by visitors who only read articles and not commented on them). I’m specifically thinking of a site with a large number of articles; only a few of them will actually have comments.
And @erlend_sh replies:
I see your predicament. But instead of the potentially messy solutions discussed so far, what if the topics are indeed created normally, but until they have a reply, they are unlisted, i.e. not visible in the forum stream and only accessible via a direct link. Would that be an acceptable compromise?
In other words, the basic spec request becomes something like this:
- Option to set topics generated for embedded comments as unlisted by default.
- Special flag that can be put on selected unlisted topics (in this case automatically) to make them unlisted if they receive a reply.
This actually sounds like a great solution, and from what I gather also easier technically than whatever sort of “staging” would be required to not create the associated topic at all until the first question is asked.
This would be awesome to have as an option in the WP Discourse plugin. I’m not sure what would be involved in making it happen but let me know. We’d love to do what we can to help make this happen.