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Multi-Level Community Forums

Not Planned


Posted Jun 10, 2014

We're looking to start aggressively building the community forum section of our site, but I feel we're a little bit limited in what can be accomplished off the bat. I'd love a way to add another level on the forums - for example, our Knowledge Base articles follow this format:

* Category
  * Topic
    * Article

while our communities are:

* Topic
  * Article

any way to add another level to this would allow us to split up our forum in a much neater manner - I believe I saw mention of it in Help Desk 1.0, but not in 2.0.


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65 comments

Hey Zunaira!

This is something we are actively looking at - would be interested in hearing about your custom solution for this.

To everyone else looking at the thread, please continue upvoting and commenting if this is something you are interested in - I am looking at these threads. 

3


@Zunaira

If you don't mind me asking, what was your workaround?

1


Justin,

the workaround currently proposed and what I believe Zunaira and her team went with - is something similar to what we have in our own Zendesk Community: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics (Click topics)

Where you can see the topics have been organised under several different headlines. This is not really a workaround to the specific problem but something that might work in some cases to get an extra layer of organisation. 

-1


+1!

Our biggest struggle right now is attempting to engage the community in addition to our Idea Portal. Our idea portal lives technically as a community topic, however because of this limitation, feedback on all parts of our product are limited to one space and the lack of tags makes it very difficult to keep track of and glean good data from.

Being able to great sub-topics would specifically allow us to do the following:

Community page with 5 topics:

Community guidelines, What's New, Q+A, User Tips and Ideas --> a user clicks on ideas and there are another group of subtopics that allow them to give us feedback/ideas regarding a specific topic/purpose within our software. 

We need this badly!!!! Looking at other idea portal options and we don't want to have to do that! 

 

 

 

2


Oscar Junker, how do you achieve what you have in your Zendesk community right now? We desperately need to do something like this as well.

0


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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

@Farid, this was done by using custom code in our Guide theme. While this isn't something we can assist with, I encourage you to take a look at some useful documentation we have available around Help Center customization:

Cheers!

-1


Brett, 

Thank you for the links.. I guess I'm looking for more specific direction in terms of how it was pulled off. Did you hard-code the main categories and which forums go in each one? And can you help point me to a direction on how to accomplish the responsive Categories container?

0


image avatar

Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi Farid,

These topics have been hard-coded on each card but my knowledge around what code was used is rather limited. I'll leave this post open in case other users want to offer up some advice for you.

-1


image avatar

Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey Farid - 

They don't provide the exact code, but here are a couple of posts that our development team who did the customization created about how they did it: 

Zendesk's Help Center theme customization, part 1: How we use Zendesk features 

Zendesk's Help Center theme customization, part 2: How we use open source tools 

I hope those help!

-1


We want to add a second level in the community: Current topics and Other topics. We use the community for software developments. The current topics are related to our roadmap.

Is there more information about the release date for this development?

0


Hi there,

You can get an additional level in your Zendesk community by grouping topics.

If you need help with it, we can do it for you. 

Best regards,

Lotus Themes

 

 

 

0


Hi Nicole, any roadmap update on this?

0


image avatar

Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi Nikolaus - 

The product team remains aware of and interested in eventually developing this, but it is not on the roadmap for 2020. 

-1


Hi,

Has there been any movement on this particular feature request? This is something we could definitely use!

0


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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi Sandra -

It's a request that the product team is definitely aware of but has not been able to put on the roadmap at this time - there are other features that have been deemed a higher priority for the currently planned development cycles.

But folks should continue to up-vote the original post if it's something you'd like to see!

-1


Hey!

Old post, but we really have this need also.

What about this tabbing- and grouping of topics you guys at Zendesk are using yourself? https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics

Is it available in your product?

0


image avatar

Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi Magnus - 

Additional levels for the community haven't been developed yet. As far as the tabbing and grouping on our own community topics page, those are all theme customizations. While they aren't available out of the box or as a downloadable theme, our engineering team did write a couple of posts on how they went about implementing it here: 

Introduction to how we did Zendesk's Help Center theme customization

Zendesk's Help Center theme customization, part 1: How we use Zendesk features

Zendesk's Help Center theme customization, part 2: How we use open source tools

I hope that helps, but let us know if you have additional questions!

1


Thanks! I will look into this. 

0


My company is new to the Zendesk suite and while we appreciate the availability of Community as a service, it lacks modern features, i.e., nesting of topics, this would make the product that much better.

Topic > Sub-Topic > PostTopic > Sub-Topic > Sub-Topic > Post  are common themes among many, if not all, Forum platforms. 

Please, Zendesk make this available soon!

 

1


We would really benefit from being able to add additional tiers to our community forums. It is way too limited to only have topics and posts and some of our topics are getting really junked up due to this. 

1


Zendesk Team - Is the feature of having a Sub category under a Main Category rolled out. Could you point me to the article which can assist me do the same.

1


This would be extremely helpful as we are looking to launch our community space soon. It is not ideal to have what we would like to use as sub-topics as their own higher-level topics. Excited for this feature - any insight on when we can expect this to be live? 

1


Why is this not a thing yet after 6 years? Can we please get an update on when a sub-topic layer will be added to the community. It should be super simple since you already have the technology with the Guide.

Topic > Sub-topic > Post.

1


Agree, this thread has been 7 years in the making so the demand for this functionality is obvious. Can we have an update please?

1


+1 Alex and Catherine.

The ball has really been dropped with this one.

1


Absolutely agree with this. It's likely not a blocker for us to go live with Help Center but it's disappointing to know how limited we are in terms of organization at the moment. Hope this makes it in to a release soon.

1


@...

You mentioned: "So to be brutally honest, this exact feature is NOT in the 9-month roadmap (which is our roadmap planning horizon basically)."

 

When will it be implemented? So we can all have some sort of measurable expectation? I understand this request has been posted for many years at this point and seemingly without any action. Can you offer some insight as to when we should expect it to be implemented?

1


Kasper Sørensen

So yeah, that update is extremely frustrating on a feature request that is 6+ years old.

What does it take to get this on the roadmap since it should be a very easy edition to the tool since guide already has this function. Who do we need to escalate too?

0


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Kasper Sørensen

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Matt and Alex,

I am sorry for any frustration over this you may feel. Our intention with this kind of update is to be transparent and let you know about our decisions instead of punting it.

You’re asking when you should expect it to be implemented, and my response is that you shouldn’t expect it to be implemented. Instead, expect us to work on related issues that we believe will alleviate the need for multi-level community topics:

  • Content tags on community posts
  • Merging community posts
  • Creating custom pages (admitted, this is more tangential - but it could be a way for you to build specialized web experiences for a set of topics)

0


+1  for this feature, would be incredibly useful and actually make the community far more easy to navigate and therefore more users will engage.  

1


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