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Hi all

I would like to suggest an option to improve the user experience when creating a new topic.

If I'm browsing within a subcategory, and click to create a new topic, the "Category" combobox should come pre-selected with the subcategory I'm in.

That makes sense?

 

 

Hi Rodrigo, great timing - this feature was just recently (in the last two weeks) delivered by our Product team and should now be how topic creation works on your community as well.  


I can verify this is working as expected as well. You can even be clever with the URL if you want to.

The way this works is that if you’re just browsing the home page (for example) the Create New Topic button will default to Question and also not selecting any Category. However, if you’re in say, Lounge Area over here, and hit the button the default selection is Question and Lounge Area respectively. I’ve been noticing this for a few months actually, so I suspect someone was testing it out quietly. :)

But as for the URL magic, https://community.insided.com/topic/new?fid=14 is the one that pre-selects Lounge Area over here. I wouldn’t recommend replacing the regular topic creation links with custom ones like this on the built-in buttons (otherwise things might break!), but it may prove useful if you wanted to have a special widget that points directly at a particular category and only appears under particular circumstances. It would definitely work very nicely in those cases! Simply replace the ID number on the end of the URL with the category you’re after and swap out the domain with your own one, unless you really do want to make this place really popular! :wink:


Nice one @Blastoise186 - I’m sure there could be some cool use cases for sharing the URL with a category ID.  :) 


No worries. I’ve also managed to figure out that you can do a few other tricks too. It’s worth bearing in mind that these tricks can’t “force” a user to be locked into just the pre-selections as the user can still override, but they’re definitely useful either way.

https://community.insided.com/topic/new?type=idea automatically pre-selects the topic type to be an Idea, which then defaults to diverting the post to the Ideation module assuming the user doesn’t change anything.

Likewise, https://community.insided.com/topic/new?fid=38&type=question should set a pre-selection to be Question and the Got a Question? category over here on inSpired. I can’t seem to do the same trick for Conversation types, but Question is probably more important anyway.

Let’s just say that I’ve learned how to do these as a result of many websites I’ve used over the years that have terrible search features with only have options to show either five or ten results per page. Navigating search results on that kind of website takes forever, but not if you’re me. In effect, I basically “make my own” buttons that can do say, 100 results per page which is much more useful (as long as I don’t abuse it)!


Has this feature been implemented? @Kenneth R 


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