Recent searches


No recent searches

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.


75

65

65 comments

Official

image avatar

Kasper Sørensen

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi everyone,

I wanted to provide an update here as I see there are some asks that we keep you better in the loop. So to be brutally honest, this exact feature is NOT in the 9-month roadmap (which is our roadmap planning horizon basically). We are however going to be working on some tangentical features that may be of interest:

  1. We will be adding Content Tags, which is going to be a user-facing tagging system where content of many types (incl. community posts) can be related/grouped/marked with the same tag. You will be able to search, navigate and filter using such tags. I believe this alleviates the need for sub-topics since it gives you even more ways to relate content.
  2. We are also investing in better theme customization capabilities. For example, we  will offer custom pages and better SDKs for building pages. There is an existing workaround described in this thread around how to visually lay out the topics in groups. With better theme customization capabilities you can also group them into pages.

With all this in mind, I'm gonna mark this post as "Not planned", just to set expectations. This is not to say that we will never touch it, but right now we are investing in other areas of the product that we also think work to the benefit of solving the underlying issues behind this feature request.

0


Or

 

Topic

 - Sub-topic

    - Posts

1


I second that @Ed

We're working on migrating our content over to the Help Center and we are very disappointed with the limitations of the Community forums.  Our goal is to provide a robust Community for our customers to self-help.  However, with such limited means of organizing the Community Forums, it will be much harder for our customers to interact with each other and our agents.

0


I second that @Ed

We're working on migrating our content over to the Help Center and we are very disappointed with the limitations of the Community forums.  Our goal is to provide a robust Community for our customers to self-help.  However, with such limited means of organizing the Community Forums, it will be much harder for our customers to interact with each other and our agents.

1


We have the same requirement.

Our use case is that we have sets of related topics:

  • our customer base is diverse. So that users can easily exchange tips with people in similar organisations or roles, we have different topics for some of our main types of user. It would be great to be able to collect these together.

  • there are a number of third party products with which we integrate, or plan to soon. Each of these has its own topic in which features are discussed and requested, and it would be great to group all the integrations together.

0


Agreed - I feel like this is absolutely needed for anyone who has multiple products or services.  I actually like to point out Zendesk's support Community as a place where this is drastically needed.  It's difficult to filter out "Help Center" information versus "Zendesk Ticketing System" information.  Wouldn't it be nice to have topics for those and then subtopics with relevant information? :P

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 organisation at the moment. Hope this makes it in to a release soon.

0


As a platform provider with significant feature sets only having the ability to segregate ultimately by product/technology type only is going to make managing community based support difficult indeed.

 

Subject matter experts in our company would subscribe to certain areas of a large product whereas if they can only follow the wider product they may not be so keen. Worse still they may subscribe but begin to ignore the alerts because of the noise generated.

0


image avatar

Heather Rommel

Zendesk LuminaryThe Product Manager Whisperer - 2021Community Moderator

I'd like to ask that we also get a way to rearrange content more easily. Right now if I have to rearrange content, it's one by one, article by article. No inline editing from a list view or something? No mass update possibility? Need!

1


Hi Heather,

Great suggestion, although not strictly related to this thread which is mainly about community and adding more levels. To be sure that others see your feedback, I would recommend to add your feedback to one of these discussions which also touch on management of articles:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/communities/public/posts/203450326-Improved-management-of-help-center-content?locale=en-us

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/communities/public/posts/203444836-Dashboard-for-live-Help-Center-articles

If they don't exactly touch on the same as you, I would recommend you to create a new post so others can comment and vote on it.

0


I think this is a must have feature. 

0


Any feedback on this? We have the same problem and restricts our use of the community forum. 

0


Multilevel topics is indeed a must have

Is it possible to create multilevel topics by means of the API (curl) ?

Just a wild guess I am not a programmer....

curl https://domain.zendesk.com/api/v2/community/topic/subtopics.json -v -u emailadress:password -d '{"subopic": {"name": “SubTopic”}}’ -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json"

Helmer

0


Zendesk, 

 What's the response here? Do you agree? Is this on the roadmap? 

0


We'd like the ability to nest topics too!

Parent Topic

   - sub-topic

        -posts

   - sub-topic

        -posts

We have a diverse user-base, and this would help organize discussion threads among the different use cases.

1


I could not find any info so far except for this post so I'm assuming this is still not possible?

0


image avatar

Ryan McGrew

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi @All,

I had mentioned this in another thread about community features, but I will comment here as well so we don't leave people hanging.

I would not expect this functionality in 2018. We've made the decision for the time being that we have a much larger opportunity to improve our knowledge base functionality and we need to prioritize our road map for Guide to focus on that. That means that Community will not receiving updates in the near term. We always reserve the right to revisit our decisions, but for now we have prioritized knowledge base features.

Sorry for the inconvenience but I wanted to make sure we have an answer for folks.

0


Hello,

I would also like this ability:

Parent Topic

   - sub-topic

        -posts

   - sub-topic

        -posts

The community is great and we'd like to utilize it for external feedback and internal feedback. As an admin, it would made it much easier for us to navigate if we can clump topics together - I can arrange in a specific order, but that means I still see ALL the topics at once. For those agents and managers who will have access to external and internal topics, I want to keep it organized for them. 

I see it's not on the 2018 road map but hopefully that can be revisited. 

Thank you!

 

0


+1 for multi-level / nested topics.

Aside from that: reading that the Community is out of Zendesk's focus is actually pretty discouraging.

0


image avatar

Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Thanks, Jan. 

0


Hello,

Is there any way that this could be revisited sooner? We hear a lot from our clients on how the community forum would enable them to have the ability to discuss amongst themselves and exchange information. They would be able to learn best practices and learn what to stay away from just by the experience of others. The way community is set up right now, it does not enable this type of communication, and we've been told it's not very customer friendly and very basic. 

I can probably go on and on on this. Please let me know what we as customers would need to do to bring this to the forefront again. 

0


image avatar

Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi Michael - 

Thanks for your feedback. Much as we would love to see this functionality, at this time there are no plans to develop the Communities platform any further. It's possible that it may be revisited at a later date. 

The best way for users to let the product teams know what you need and want is to up vote on the original posts for threads and add detailed comments and use cases here. 

Thanks for your participation - wish I had more exciting news for you! 

0


We would also like to have more granularity within our community. We are looking to totally reorganize our posts and having sub-topics would be a great way to get this accomplished.

Up-vote!

 

0


image avatar

Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Thanks for the feedback, Justin!

 

0


This is something we would love to see -- I echo Michael's sentiment that this would help the user gain so much more value from the Community, as well as help our Product Managers sort through feedback in a more organized fashion. 

We would potentially be willing to pay for this development on a custom basis; perhaps other customers would also be excited to "crowd-fund" this feature together. 

1


We are in the process of building a user forum using community, as we have multiple products this would be so much easier if there was an additional level in the hierarchy. When will Zendesk add this ^clearly popular additional functionality?

0


image avatar

Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi all - 

Good news! Development has resumed on the community platform, and this is one of the features that the team is considering. 

You're welcome to continue to up-vote the thread and share your detailed use-cases, so that the product managers can better solve for the challenges that you're facing. 


 

0


Re: Good news! Development has resumed on the community platform, and this is one of the features that the team is considering. 

It's a Christmas miracle!!  

3


Hey everyone,

we are doing some research around this feature(and others) early next year, and would love to have some of you participate.

You can sign up for a session here: https://calendly.com/zencommunity/usability-testing-scoping-of-new-community-features 

Let me know if the provided time slots does not work for you.

Looking forward to talking with you! 

 

0


We've recently started dev work on our forum and require this feature. At the moment there's no way to do this and we've found a hack around it. But going forward the hack will have to be replaced with a good permanent solution. Hope that this feature is developed and quickly too.

Thanks!

1


Please sign in to leave a comment.

Didn't find what you're looking for?

New post