A new way to highlight our decisions

One of the issues that we face fairly frequently on this blog is that we have long discussion threads, resulting in hidden conclusions that are tough to find. This is, of course, due to the enthusiastic and vibrant nature of our community – something that we love and will always endeavour to foster as much as we can.

In an effort to help with improving our decision making process (as @francina discussed thoroughly in this post), we have installed a new plugin on this blog that allows us to highlight a ‘top comment’ that sums up the conversation or highlights the decision that has been made. This pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party is now active and can be used on any post on this site – if a user is able to edit the post in question, then they can select the top comment for that post.

To mark a top comment, simply select the appropriate link from the comment action menu:

This will highlight the comment itself and also make it appear at the top of the comment thread along with a handy ‘view in context’ link alongside it. I have used this new feature on an old post, so you can see how it looks and works in practice.

Other contribution teams can have this plugin activated on their blogs as well by posting a request on Make/Meta. If you would like to contribute to the plugin’s functionality or report any issues that are specifically about this plugin, then please use the GitHub repo.

Enjoy!