A way to bring attention to timely questions?

Question

Inspired by this question: Idea: Weekly topic challenges

Judaism is full of occasions that happen on a regular cycle. For example, Jewish holidays happen every year, and we read the same Parsha every year.

It might be useful to bring notice to those question when we come around to them again. For example, this week is Parshat Pinchas. Last year at this time people asked questions concerning the Parsha. It might be useful to have them stick out, float to the top, or something like that (sort of like how the bounty questions are given prominence).

A year later, there may be some more answers to the questions, and people who weren't members last year may benefit from seeing the questions, or may be able to offer further insight.

This would also be useful when holidays come around, since there are lots of questions about the different holidays.

Some things, like Rosh Chodesh, Kiddush Levanah, etc. happen monthly, but it may be a bit much to see the same questions every month.

Answer 1

This is now doable with the Community Bulletin board. In fact, we did it for this Shavuos.

Answer 2

In the absence of such, any user can edit an old post on the topic, bumping it to the top of the recently-edited-questions list (the default question list seen on the site).

Answer 3

If we indeed do a weekly meta post for the challenge, it could possibly include a section for seasonal tags that are coming up and maybe even links to some of the best questions therein.

Alternatively, all of a sudden, it's sounding like we might have use for a blog.

Answer 4

On second thought, why mix things up? It's your idea; I think you should run with it.

Why don't you start a weekly/monthly "seasonal content" series here on meta? Here are my suggestions for what each post could do:

• Note annual (I agree that anything more frequent wouldn't work well.) observances (parsha, holidays, etc.) that are coming up.
• Link to existing tags that are pertinent.
• Link to and play up existing content that is particularly worth reading (or needing better answers!).
• Invite readers to learn from and improve existing content and to add new questions on the seasonal theme.
• Use Markdown to make the posts look like blog posts.

You should come up with a special tag to identify posts in this series. Interested people who don't normally frequent meta could then subscribe to the tag using RSS. We could also create a filter based on the tag to facilitate people signing up for email updates.

I'd be willing to advertise this new feature to all users on the main site using a system message once, for 48 hours, but not regularly.

If you get this going, it could eventually morph into a feature on a blog if we start one. In fact, having a feature like this already running on meta would make it a lot easier to get a blog going.