Would it be possible, after a reasonable period of time, to remove the text explaining what’s in the stickies in ATMB?
A: They take up a huge amount of screen space.
1: It’s tempting, but not wise, to unpin them . . . as I’ve learned.
B: New posters should be encouraged to actually read the rules, not just a synopsis of them.
C: I’m hoping the new rule(s) guidelines on transgender issues will be rolled into a/the singular rules thread . . . and I’d also like a pony.
I’m not sure what text you mean. At least in the theme I use, all I see is the thread title and below it the forum name. Could you copy and past the text you are talking about?
It appears that what the OP is seeing is not a “blurb” but the first few lines of the OP. It should be obvious that it’s not going to be possible to remove this. I doubt there is any way to hide it either.
Then the only thing that would help would be pruning and/or combining them into fewer threads. They do take up an excessive amount of space, especially on mobile.
In Discourse by default when you read to the bottom of a pinned topic, that topic automatically becomes unpinned (for you). Logic being, you read it, you’re good, you don’t need to see that very same text you already read every single time you visit that category for the rest of time. That option has been disabled here for… reasons.
So you’ll need to visit these topics, scroll to the bottom, then manually use the button at the bottom of the topic to change them from Pinned to Unpinned (for you).
At least it’s an option! In older forum software, users are forced to look at that pinned topic forever, which I personally view as a kind of cruel and unusual punishment.
Given the replies, it appears that this might be a ‘’‘feature’‘’ of the Straight Dope Light theme for pinned threads.
(And I’m betting there nothing that the mods can do about it anyway.)
Given you feel that way maybe you could explain why the software (at least in the theme I’m using) forces you to look at the first three-plus sentences unless you unpin the thread?
I can certainly imagine some board that wants to have their rules thread always visible to all users, I can see some board forcing you to see the first three sentences until you actually scroll through the thread and pretend you’ve read the rules, but this…
you have the option to manually unpin a pinned topic (for you)
by default, when you read a pinned topic to completion, it automatically unpins (for you). That’s not enabled here, but see the previous point.
The spirit of the thing is “it’s annoying to see the same text repeated on my screen every day” which I heartily agree with. Scroll to the bottom of the topic and press the “Unpin” button as illustrated in the screenshot above
Maybe a compromise would be to hard-pin them in ATMB, so they don’t clutter all the other categories? Can topics be hard-pinned, to force users to see that they are there?
In the past, we have consolidates pinned threads by making a single pinned thread which linked to the others. That was an okay solution.
But, given how much of this is cruft that has built up over years, I think it would be better and actually figure out if all of it is necessary, and cut it down. Then put all the text in a single thread, with the first post being a table of contents with links to individual posts (like how @GreysonCarlisle set up his guide to everything Discourse).
I do think you need one rule thread per forum, seeing as different forums have different rules. However, many of those forums could just show the differences and link back to the main rule thread for the rest. (And forums like P&E which share rules with GD can link to the rules there, and only cover what makes P&E different.)
On a side note: I also think that thread I linked above should be pinned separately in ATMB. I haven’t found a thread in all of Discourse that covers everything it does. Not even the threads I’ve found @codinghorror’s Discourse Meta have such an extensive guide to how the markup works here.
If you’re looking for pinned topics after you unpinned them, search for in:pinned – within a category, like so:
in:pinned #site-feedback
Also, for the mods, if you made REALLY important change to a pinned topic and want to force it back on to everyone’s pinned list to make sure everyone saw it…
un-pin the topic
re-pin the topic
this will force it back into everyone’s pinned list.
I think it’s unlikely that a random poster, wondering what the rules in a forum are, would guess that that particular string would be helpful in finding it. They might have some luck searching for something more obvious, like “rules”.
In Discourse by default when you read to the bottom of a pinned topic, that topic automatically becomes unpinned (for you). Logic being, you read it, you’re good, you don’t need to see that very same text you already read every single time you visit that category for the rest of time. That option has been disabled here for… reasons.
