I’ve noticed that when posting a new topic, a popup appears on the right side of my screen listing previous threads under the heading “Your topic is similar to…” but after the new topic is posted, there appears a listing of related topics below mine that is often radically different from the pre-posting list, and usually radically better–more relevant, closer in focus, et cetera. Both lists are generated, presumably, using the same database so why would they be such different lists, and why would the second one be so much better than the first?
This is a feature of Discourse, so I moved it to Site Feedback.
Personally, I find it largely useless most of the time.
Thanks. Not entirely useless, because sometimes you get referred to an identical topic with loads of replies. The problem for me is that the list that appears after I’ve posted mine supplies an identical topic much more often.
It links by keywords and tags, so it can’t be expected to compare content but it often does reference older threads with similar topics. Whether this is valuable to you or not depends on how interested you are in what may have been discussed on an issue previously but I wouldn’t call it useless, and in general I find Discourse much easier to search than the previous iteration of board software even if I do get frustrated with some of its formatting issues.
Stranger
The overall search is way better.
I stand by the recommends are mostly useless. At least to me.
They aren’t useful to me either. I can’t think of a time where a recommendation actually recommended something I was interested in. I just stick to new threads in categories I’m interested in.
Worse than useless. Always wrong and actively annoying. IMO
I think the point is that there are 2 different lists of “related” topics …
One which appears while you are creating your post (“your post is similar to”),
and another which appears under your post (“Suggested” and “Related”) which
you only see when you’ve posted it.
The former is largely useless while the latter appears to be much more useful.
The question is, why are they not the same ?
(My guess would be that the first just uses the thread title while the second
has access to the whole post.)
They may use the same database, but the related topics list at the bottom is generated using AI. The “Your topic is similar to…” list is not.
I also find it mostly useless. YMMV.
One big difference is that the list at the bottom of a posted thread is heavily biased for recency. It’s also almost always threads in the same forum, and it also favors threads that you’ve posted in or viewed.
But yeah, the one that pops up while you’re creating a thread is completely useless. Sometimes, the only link I can find between the threads is they both have “the” in the title, or something.
It’s almost like that nasty in-law that has to criticize anything you do, and sometimes really stretches things to do so.