Multi-Level Community Forums

Not planned
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Daniel Santoro

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

Date
    Newest

      Official

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      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.

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      Alex Duffey

      "I would not expect to be able to use this functionality in 2018. Our decision, for the time being, has been to prioritize our road map for Guide to focus on the areas where we have a much larger potential to improve our knowledge base functionality in the future. That means that there will be no updates for Community in the near future. For now, we are prioritizing the features in the knowledge base over other features in our system, but we reserve the right to revisit them in the future."

      8 years of clients asking for this feature is not impactful enough? Community is easily the weakest tool on the Zendesk platform and needs improvement. I am going to start recommending looking for other solutions due to the lack of support on this feature.

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      Dave Dyson

      Hi Luke, I hear and can understand your frustration. At the same time, I know that product teams always have to ask themselves "What's the most impactful thing my team needs to work on right now?", and that word "impactful" has a lot of layers to it -- how many customers and potential customers will this impact, how challenging will it be to build, and what's the level of impact it will have? How will if affect our ability to land and keep customers in the marketplace? Does this fit our product philosophy? And all that is true at the organizational level as well -- where do you allocate your product and engineering resources? Product managers and leadership have to make very hard decisions, because resources are always limited, and when we receive thousands of product feedback suggestions every month as we do, that inevitably means that many popular ideas will not make the cut.
       
      Feedback is a gift, and frank feedback doubly so. The more we can understand your use cases and the cost of not having the things you want, the better the decisions we can make, and we'll try to provide information when we can around what our plans are. I know all this isn't the answer you were hoping for, but I do hope it can provide some understanding. Thanks for listening.
       

      -1

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      Luke Tyhurst

      1263082116169 Is there any way to add this to the roadmap? This is obviously something that is important to the Zendesk community. It is disheartening that the effort over the last 8 years hasn't lead to the improvement this post asked for. There are quite a few features I have seen lately that have not gotten picked up. As a new Zendesk user, it isn't a great look. Overall, we would love to use the Community tool, but lack of development realistically makes it hard to use/rely on.

      1

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      Dave Dyson

      Hi Luke, 
       
      This is still not on the roadmap - Kasper's previous comments from August 2021 are the latest word on the subject. 

      -1

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      Luke Tyhurst

      Zendesk, can we please get an update on this? It has now been 8 years after this feature has been requested and I see that we still don't have multi-level organization within the community section. This would be a significant improvement.

      1

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      Amy Hunt

      +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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      Kasper Sørensen

      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)

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      Alex Duffey

      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?

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      Matt Gargula - Manager

      383749197174

      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?

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      hindpathan

      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

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