I was wondering if we can improve the regular automated posts on the forum linking to a community post from a random time ago. I can imagine their goal is to highlight the many community tutorials, but in their current version these posts confuse me (and probably others) as they have today’s date and time in their topic title. Only after I open them, and then only after I click the link, (so not until the third page has loaded) I can see it’s actually an old post of x years ago. And as these posts don’t have any recent comments, I’m left wondering what triggered their sudden automated post to the forum.
RFE 1: can we set the date&time in these automated thread titles to the date &time the original post was posted?
RFE 2: For the threads which are posted random automatically as sort of a ‘flashback celebration’ without any user triggering them, can we start those topic titles with something like "Flashback Friday: " , "Throwback Thursday: ", or "Repost: " ? That would be super helpful in differentiating content on the forum. Thanks!
Some examples from last 7 days, all without recent comments, all original posts from a long time ago, and topic titles set to recent date.
probably you guys have already thought about this, but a solution would seem to change the trigger to let your script only post a the link to the forum if
the original community post was just now published
or if
a comment including text has been added to the database.
We are considering the first optionyou mention, in that we’d just create the forum post immediately when the article is published. It will make for lots of empty placeholder topics, but battling the bots is not something we have time for. #2 isn’t an option as the post needs to be created in forum before text can be added. We could do a ‘form’ for first post, but again, that wouldn’t be bot-proof.
I agree battling the bots is something you don’t want to work on. The first option is great though, it actually does not matter if there are no comments yet - it pulls an audience from the forum to a new community post, so I would not call it just a placeholder - it will probably increase engagement. And it will result in the date in the forum thread title always matching the date the story was posted, which will clear up all the current confusion.
Easy workaround suggestion: currently today’s date is added to the forum thread title, which adds to the confusion. If you replace that with the date the original article was posted, people can see immediately it’s old news.