How does the related topics widget work?

  • 6 November 2018
  • 17 replies
  • 331 views
Julian
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  • Julian
  • Gainsight Employee: ACE
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The related topics widget performs an automatic search on content on your community.



These things are being taken into account for the search:


  • It takes the title of the topic, and compares it (by query similarity and matching words) to the title and the first post of all existing topics.
  • The best matches are the topics which have the most words in common.
  • The higher the order is of a certain related topic the more relevant it is to the Topic (order of relevance is from top to bottom).
I follow my nose, it always knows

17 replies

T
Hi Julian,



On the TUI Community the widget doesn't seem to show the best matches in 'related topics'.

For instance: on a topic about seat reservations it shows 'related' topics on visa, but not other topics on seat reservations.



What can I do to improve these best matches?



Thanks in advance!



Tessel
tom.shaddock
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Hi Tessel, there are a few things you can do to improve these matches:


  1. Firstly you could tag up relevant content yourself, so for the example 'seat reservations' you could add the tag 'seat reservation' or 'reservation' to topics you think are related. The search algorithm will then see these matching tags and give preference to these topics in the related topics suggestions.
  2. As it uses the same indexing algorithm as the search functionality, you could in theory create some articles about reservations which are then given higher ranking preference.
  3. Marking certain questions as answered will also rank them higher, making them more likely appear in related topics widget.

I'm also sure @Julian has got some much better suggestions on how to curate this content even more! 😉
C

Hi @Julian ,

How can I reduce or switch off the related topic option as it shows far to many lines and on a mobile device our user will need to scroll down  before actually be able to post their question.

Thanks, Claudia

 

Julian
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Hi @Claudia.Willunat,

 

you can adjust this by using the side widget settings for the related topics widget:

In your Control Environment, under [Customization] - [Side widgets], you can find the related topics widget in the list on the right side:

If you reduce the amount of topics displayed (e.g. three topics instead of five), the amount of lines will be reduced.

I follow my nose, it always knows
Julian
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Hi Julian,

On the TUI Community the widget doesn't seem to show the best matches in 'related topics'.
For instance: on a topic about seat reservations it shows 'related' topics on visa, but not other topics on seat reservations.

What can I do to improve these best matches?

Thanks in advance!

Tessel


Sorry@Tessel, I must have forgotten to follow up on this. Do you still see problems here? Then we can discuss again, maybe you can share a recent example?

Tom mentioned some good tips already, but maybe I find other things which could boost the accuracy of this widget!

I follow my nose, it always knows
T

Hi @Julian, for now I got enough input from Tom. Thanks!

 

 

 

a.slyusar
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Hi, everyone
I have some stranges question from my business customer: Is it possible to display certain topics in only one of the sections of the message? For example - We have hidden section for our employees on which there is confidential information and we want to add most important or popular topics from this part of community only for this members. 
https://prnt.sc/r0se25 1. hidden section; 2. topics from main community

                                 

bjoern_schulze
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Hi @a.slyusar, I don’t think this is the “Related topics” widget that you are showing as “2” in your screenshot, but the “Solved topics” widget.

What you are trying to achieve is - at the moment - only possible with a lot of effort. Currently inSided doesn’t offer an “easy” way to configure sidebars only for certain categories (sections). There is an idea for that.

But if you or your colleagues know HTML and JavaScript, you could create an HTML widget. Within the HTML widget you could use JavaScript to declare that the widget only shows content when this certain category (section) is shown and you could use HTML to create a manual list of links you want to show.

BUT: There are some potential disadvantages:

  • This is not easy to do
  • This is not very flexible, because you need to change the HTML every time you want to add/remove a link
  • It could have (small) consequences regarding your performance, because the HTML widget would load on every single page load, but only be displayed on one page
  • It is not safe because the whole source code (and therefore every link) would be publicly visible for people who know what to look for

My recommendation is to use “Curated content”.

It doesn’t fully solve your task, because this widget wouldn’t be shown in the sidebar, but in the content area. But apart from that, I think, it is your best option.

Go to “Platform” → “Community” and select the category (section) you want to edit. Scroll a bit down to “Curated content” and activate it by toggling “Show curated list”. You then can put any content from the community into the “Topics” field.

After you saved your changes, you’ll find a list of links above the content in the category (section) you just edited. 

Suvi Lehtovaara
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Hi @Julian!

We are in the process of mass-closing old topics. At first we’re closing topics that are older than 5 years and we’ll probably continue to topics that are, let’s say older than 3 years. For us this means almost 100 000 topics.

So my question is, does the Related topics widget show closed content in it? 

https://yhteiso.elisa.fi/
bjoern_schulze
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@Suvi Lehtovaara Yes, the “Related topics” widget shows all topics that are “findable” via Search. So the only content that won’t be shown there is content that is in an Archive category (meaning, the toggle “Hide category and topics from platform search” is activated).

Suvi Lehtovaara
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@Suvi Lehtovaara Yes, the “Related topics” widget shows all topics that are “findable” via Search. So the only content that won’t be shown there is content that is in an Archive category (meaning, the toggle “Hide category and topics from platform search” is activated).

Well that’s a bummer. As we do not want to archive all that content (due to SEO reasons) at this point… Thanks for your quick answer @bjoern_schulze !

https://yhteiso.elisa.fi/
bjoern_schulze
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You could archive it but still leave it findable on Google. The options for “Hide from platform search” and “deindex, nofollow” are separate. So you could create an archive category that is hidden from the platform search but not hidden from google. But maybe hiding it from the platform search is also not a good option for your usecase.

Julian
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You could also think of a two-level archiving of old content: A set of archive categories which are still indexed via Google and/or in community search for content you still regard somewhat relevant, and for the really old content a single category which is hidden for everything (only users going to that category can still search within this archive then).

Besides a feature request to optionally toggle individual / batch process a set of topics to be hidden from search or this specific widget, I would not know what could solve this exact use case, unfortunately.

I follow my nose, it always knows
Suvi Lehtovaara
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You could archive it but still leave it findable on Google. The options for “Hide from platform search” and “deindex, nofollow” are separate. So you could create an archive category that is hidden from the platform search but not hidden from google. But maybe hiding it from the platform search is also not a good option for your usecase.

Thanks to you @bjoern_schulze and your comment from yesterday, that’s exactly what I’m considering! 

And @Julian, what an amazing idea! We’re weighing out options and their SEO effects, so this could probably be the best option for us...

https://yhteiso.elisa.fi/
victorlacombe
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Hi @Julian does the related topic widget show topics from the same plateforme (ie : KB or Community) or does it mix different plateforme content (KB and Community)?

 

Thanks

Julian
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Hi,

the related topics widget shows content from both KB and community, it does not make a distinction here. Do you have a need for such a distinction? If so, let us know more so we can understand better what you’d like to achieve with a setting or filter for this.

I follow my nose, it always knows
victorlacombe
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Hi Julian,

Thanks for the answer. Having both KB and community mixed here creates sort of a confusion for the end user. When reading a topic in the knowledge base, you kind of expect to have associated topics that have the right answer / are validated as “You can trust this content”

When browsing on the KB part of our community, should not have to wonder if the associated topic is a Knowledge base article (they can trust) or an open topic (that might not bring them the answer).
 

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