Feature Topics on your community

  • 11 December 2017
  • 21 replies
  • 1903 views
Frank
Userlevel 6
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  • Frank
  • Product Guru
  • 26 replies posted

This way of featuring topics is no longer recommended for featuring topics on your homepage: we instead recommend that you read our guide on featuring topics with our new homepage customization tool.

 

By adding a moderator tag to a topic you can feature a topic. There are four designated places in your community where you can feature topics:

  • On the community homepage below the hero image (featured_home)
  • On the subforum page, below the hero image (featured_subforum)
  • As a banner below the community navigation (featured_banner)
  • As a block on top of the sidebar (featured_side)

How to feature topics

  1. Go to Control > Forum > Overview.
  2. Find and click the topic you’d like to feature.
  3. Add a moderator tag to the topic based on where you want to feature it (see below for the list of tags together with images that show where the topic will be featured on your community).


Click below to see how each moderator tag will feature your topic on your community:

⛰️Community homepage (Moderator tag: featured_home )

6e95d87c-569b-4437-b54f-a4fbe63213f7.jpg


⛰️ Subforum page (Moderator tag: featured_subforum )

1a3f9b56-b9aa-4948-834a-9123d2767466.jpg


⛰️Banner (Moderator tag: featured_banner )

d91664c4-b388-4429-aec8-41f10419d332.jpg


⛰️ Above the sidebar (Moderator tag: featured_side )

701561db-f2ae-475c-9453-df37de0e3634.jpg

 

 

⚠ You can only feature one topic as a banner and one topic in the sidebar. A topic featured in the sidebar or as a banner is visible on all pages in the community.

🎯 Don’t feature the same topic as a banner and in the sidebar. A featured topic as a banner is a serious attention grabber, so try to use it sparingly.

💎 You can feature up to three topics on the community homepage and on the subforum page. On the homepage you can feature any topic from the community. On the subforum page you can only feature topics that were posted in that subforum.

💎 The background colour of featured topics in the banner and sidebar are based on the primary colour of your community

 

 

21 replies

Jurgen
Userlevel 6
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How do you add a picture to featured topics (when possible)?
Julian
Rank
Userlevel 7
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Hi Jurgen,

you simply add them to the attachment of your post - the platform will grab it and display it automatically then.

Or is there something else unclear / missing in this regard?

Cheers,

Julian
I follow my nose, it always knows
Jurgen
Userlevel 6
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Not a big fan of attachments, but that works fine 🙂 What’s the recommended size for these banners?
Julian
Rank
Userlevel 7
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Agree, I am not a big fan of attachments as well. However it makes sense I guess: Let's say you post a longer how-to topic that has several images embedded. If the platform would simply grab the first image in your post, it might not pick the right image. Hence putting it in the attachment gives you control of which image should be used as the feature image.

I am not sure about the recommended size - I only noticed that the featured image is a slightly cropped version of the original. I will try to find out more and get back to you!
I follow my nose, it always knows
Julian
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Userlevel 7
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Not a big fan of attachments, but that works fine 🙂 What’s the recommended size for these banners?

Better late than never: Link 😉
I follow my nose, it always knows
bjoern_schulze
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Userlevel 6
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There's a tiny mistake in the tutorial. It says: "You can feature up to three topics on the community homepage and in the category page. On the homepage you can feature any topic from the community. On the category page you can only feature topics that were posted in that category."

Correct is: "You can feature up to three topics on the community homepage and in the subforum page. On the homepage you can feature any topic from the community. On the subforum page you can only feature topics that were posted in that subforum."
H
Userlevel 1
Hi all,

I noticed that you could add the "Notification" widget (for the featured_side topic) more than once, though because the tag is the same it would display the same tagged topic in each widget.

Do you think that for next improvements it could be possible to look at a way to feature more than one selected topic at a time on the sidebar? Like the "Solved topics" widget that allows us to display 5 topics?
Yoeri
Rank
Userlevel 7
We won't allow multiple featured topics in the sidebar when you add featured_side tags to multiple tickets. The purpose of the featured topic in the sidebar with the background is to grab the user's attention to this specific, important topic. When we allow multiple featured topics of this kind it will lose its value.

We are currently working on an 'Open text' sidebar widget with HTML/CSS support. This allows you to create your own widgets from scratch. Within this widget you can create lists, links, banners and more (basically everything that is covered with HTML/CSS). You could use this widget to create a list of topics that you want to feature. We expect to have some updates on this by the end of this year.
Platform Lead, inSided
H
Userlevel 1
Hi @Yoeri, thanks for your reply, I completely understand your point about the multiple topics based on the fact that they have a specific design that grabs the eyes.

If there is another feature in the talks that could allow us to choose the specific topics we wish to promote in the sidebar for easier access and visibility then that's awesome, it will certainly solve quite a lot of our current issues.
Yoeri
Rank
Userlevel 7
You're welcome 🙂 We are currently investigating how we can promote topics in your community in a better way, this might be interesting for you. On the homepage we want to show a basic list of topics that you want to promote. In the category pages we want to make changes to the sticky topics so that they are better visible and we want to allow you to drag & drop them in the right order on they should display.

Attached you'll find an example on how promoted topics on the homepage could look like
1 Attachment
Platform Lead, inSided
H
Userlevel 1
Hi @Yoeri that sounds very cool, and would definitely be quite useful, especially the homepage promoted topics.
C
Userlevel 1
Badge

Hi All, 

We recently added a post to our banner with the 'featured_banner' moderator tag, but I would like to find a way to remove the date next to the title — is this a setting? Or could you share suggested custom CSS that might help us here?

Thank you!

freydrew
Userlevel 4
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@cherise that’s a great idea. I could benefit from that too. 

Drew -- Senior Communications Manager
bjoern_schulze
Rank
Userlevel 6
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I don’t think that there is a setting to remove the timestamp from the “featured_banner”, but Custom CSS can hide it.

.featuredBanner .thread-meta-item__date {display:none;}

Note: I can’t guarantee that it works without any regressions as I only quickly checked it. Please use it with care and at your own risk.

Yoeri
Rank
Userlevel 7

I tested the suggestion above; .featuredBanner .thread-meta-item__date {display:none;} worked for me 👍

Platform Lead, inSided
C
Userlevel 1
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Yes it worked for us too! Thank you, @bjoern_schulze !

D
Userlevel 2

Hi @Frank  I know its not preferred - however - does the “featured_side” moderator tag still work?  I can’t get it to show up. 

 

UPDATE: Nevermind - I realized you need the “Announcement Widget” in the sidebar in Control.  
Thanks.

Julian
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

Yes this still works, however you have to make sure that the sidebar also has this item listed there.

For the homepage, you can add this via Customization mode.

For topic & general pages (read: category and other pages), you have to activate it in the Control environment (under [Customization] - [Sidebar]). This is the item which you have to drag and drop in the right position:

Then it should work!

I follow my nose, it always knows
Gabolino
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Userlevel 5
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Hey question for you @Yoeri and @Julian if I may. Can we show different featured topics depending on the category? Or are these shown globally shown across all categories? 

Julian
Rank
Userlevel 7
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There are ways to feature specific content on specific category pages, however not via this method. This is the outdated, old way to feature content.

The most easy and straightforward way to feature category-specific content would be content curation:

Note that we speak in this product update about building a Knowledge Base for your categories - this is because you can actually feature several topics at a time. However you are free to customize the title of this segment to whatever you find suitable (e.g. “highlighted content”).

Does this look like a good way to achieve what you want to do on your community? There are other ways to feature content in the category sidebar only on specific categories, but these processes are not as easy to maintain...

I follow my nose, it always knows
Gabolino
Rank
Userlevel 5
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Hmmm. It's good to see there's a way to do this, but that feature seems to be pretty much based on knowledge base style content both from a formatting and a content perspective. 

Can you only highlight knowledge base content with it? 

Out intention is to highlight events, product updates etc so visually that format won't do much justice 

Thnks for sharing. 

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