How does the related topics widget work?

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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. 

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? 

@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).