How do I start a new discussion?

hi, ken. as of yesterday, we've removed the ability to create discussions in our system, though as you've noticed the older ones still remain viewable (the technical term for this is to say that discussions are "deprecated," for whatever that's worth.)

in the year that our service has been live, discussions have been more a source of confusion for people than anything else, both employees and customers. the rest of the topic types, question, problem, and idea, are very outcome-oriented and make sense to people who are engaging in company-customer interactions, while discussions has always been very unclear and unfocused. we had initially thought it would be used for customer-to-customer discussions, but it just hasn't played out that way.

at the same time, many people were asking for a place to say nice things about a company, and often using the discussion topic type for that. in fact, we did a review of all the discussion topics created across our entire system, and learned that that the vast majority of them were actually getting used exclusively for praise. so! we did the obvious thing, and removed discussions in favor of praise. we're pretty excited to see how it gets used.

for the record, the few discussions that were created that weren't praise were overwhelmingly updates from the company that didn't fit anywhere else -- communication from a company out to its customers. so along with praise we've actually added a fifth topic type, "company update," that you'll probably see show up somewhere pretty soon (it has a grey background and a cute little megaphone icon that was designed by my wife!) it can only be created by an employee of that company while they're on their "add a topic" page at the moment, though we'll be creating new ways to start those topics for employees in the coming months as we continue to roll out design updates.

we have a new post on this coming out later today (using the new "company update" type -- woo!) that will explain all this in more detail. but in the meantime, hope this helps!