So far, I’m really loving this community, the depth of discussions, and the incredible content posted here. But even though Discourse is a really nice forum format, there is an inherent downside to high activity forums: excellent content that gets drowned out / lost / hard to find in the jungle of posts.
One thing that would add a lot of value going forward is a way for new users to easily discover some of the best content from the past. That way, current members can mark valuable posts and make them more discoverable for new visitors.
Is there a way we can do this?
EDIT: to clarify, I’m talking about excellent single replies in topics, not overall topics with the best post-to-like ratio
The Summarize This Topic button will pull the posts with the most likes and what the community has deemed to be the most interesting.
It is flawed though, since if someone posts something informative or good at a time when forum activity is high, it can get buried and not receive the love that it should. There is a Discourse v. 2.0 that is supposed to be releasing this summer which I am hoping will be implementing these features. It is tough though as the creators are very opinionated on certain things, like the “summarize this topic” being best practice.
Its definitely something we would like to implement though instead of having to pull posts out of a thread into a new topic.
That’s nice to hear, and I look forward to those updates.
I think bookmarks could be given a bit more importance in the thread summaries. If many people bookmark a post, that indicates that it’s something they find valuable enough to come back to later on. If a lot of people want to come back to a post, that’s likely something which holds long term value and deserves to be easily discovered by new users.
To make such modifications, do we need to rely on updates to Discourse, or can these thing be tacked on manually?
BADGES AS TITLES
OK, so I see that this can happen with some earned badges. But it would be really funny to enable this with some of the lesser badges.
“Autobiographer”
“First Emoji”
and of course, “Certified”
Any news on the 2.0 version? (Best to wait on the 2.0.1 release). I would think that it would be reasonable to have some posts marked by your editorial staff as significant be included in any summary.
Meanwhile, I wonder if there is a bug in the profile Title selection. Since earning Regular, I have the choice of either Regular or no title. But I was here in early May, and I could have sworn that there was some Founding Member or something like that there before. I tend not to use titles unless they are a) required or 2) funny or clever.
