Related discussions and proposals
Aija Zvidrina PublicSeen by 69Do we see an use in having a way of linking related issues/proposals?
Currently this seems to work by posting a comment with a link, but how about an option to link one discussion with another (e.g. by name or ID) and then display it either below the description or some other constant place.
This is an important topic since with few active users related or even duplicated discussions will appear. The best way I see to solve this is an interactive dashboard which contains filters for: keywords, geographical attributes, votes and shows all discussions and proposals helping users to find what they want and similar.
This is something I've come up against too, where I remember there was a discussion thread of X, but nobody has commented it for a while, and it's buried somewhere down in the pages of parked discussions. I agree with @zack that it would help to be able to keyword search discussion titles, as you can email subjects in GMail for example.
I think it would also help if there was a way to 'archive' discussions which are probably finished (eg related to an upcoming event which has now happened). These could be accessed separately from active discussions, resulting in fewer of these to search through.
As a simple first step, I really like Github's solution to this, bidirectional links:
Say I want to talk about Issue 23 in a discussion on Issue 47, I can comment like this: "I think this is solved by #23".
On the Issue 47 side, this automatically creates a link to Issue 23. On the Issue 23 side, it automatically creates a cross-reference back like "This issue was mentioned in Issue 47".
@richarddbartlett sounds a very logical approach.
Is there a simple way of linking to particular posts? This coud be useful when you have several proposals developing in a discussion, and then you want to separate them out into new stand alone discussions.
@neilmorris there's a 'permalink' on the timestamp of every comment, like this: https://www.loomio.org/discussions/5298#comment-42221
The stack exchange sites do this really well. Any question that has a similar title (and perhaps similar keywords in the question body) is added to a "related questions" block in the side-bar. Any links to other questions are included in a "linked questions" block, above the related block, on both pages (the page where the link is, and the page where the link points to).
Very important issue! Perhaps we could use color-coding to group related discussions? I suggested this idea here: https://www.loomio.org/d/4fVnISHs/color-coding-discussions-listed-on-group-pages
I also think it would be great to have related discussions appear on the side, within each discussion.
@richarddbartlett, how do you find the permalink to the specific comment?
@olover right-click on the timestamp at the bottom of a comment: you should see an option to 'copy link address'. Then you can paste that link anywhere. Make sense?
Somewhat related idea: while you're starting a new discussion, loomio could show a few discussions that seem relevant based on keywords in context panel.