I agree, this indeed would be very useful. I wonder if there is a plugin for that!
A related, I guess, idea could be to add “solved” or “solution” tag, which could then be used to configure the search using the existing search interface.
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About lumping the post likes together, I asked the question on the Discourse forum, but despite trying to clarify several times, I did not get an answer: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-q-a-plugin-for-sorting-posts-with-the-most-likes-at-the-top/8414/24. I guess my responses to that thread could also be deleted as I don’t think I added any useful information! 
Feel free to post to that “topic” to clarify/follow up.
Thanks for trying! Their answers are frustrating at the least. In this sense I shouldn’t answer questions about “Segmentation Editor” because technically there is no such thing…
I’ll give it a go myself, hoping to get the terms right, and leave no possibility to intentionally misunderstand.
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These guys there are killing me… Maybe it’s a competition about how many replies you can muster without actually answering.
I agree, that exchange was very un-helpful. I am not sure … Maybe this is our opportunity to feel “on the other side of the fence”. They have a community that has certain expectations (that we don’t know), and maybe the attitude is “this is so simple that if you cannot figure it out you don’t belong here”. No idea.
Yes, it’s very interesting to experience what is it like to be a newbie. Discourse guys give correct answers and they answer quickly, but we still end up walking away with a bad impression because they are not friendly or empathetic.
Definitely an interesting experience, but if the same style inquiry had been on our discourse, then we would have split the discussion into a topic in the right place, and gave some actual answer. Maybe brief and maybe with follow-up questions, but not such dismissive replies for sure. I’ll keep trying for a bit though.
In the search result page every topic appears maximum once, ordered by the total number of likes in that topic, including the original post and the replies, which is in case of topic A is N*M. The link of the item in the search result page points to the original post in the topic (i.e. the whole topic).
Is this what you want?
- 3D Slicer Community (sorted by total likes on all posts in topic)
See also:
- 3D Slicer Community (sorted by number of likes on first post)
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Yes! If this is available for search, and we can make it the default, then problem solved.
The ordering by number of likes (https://discourse.slicer.org/top?order=likes) does not seem to show the most important topics. Maybe liking posts more consistently could improve the list, since ordering based on views gives a much better result: https://discourse.slicer.org/top?order=views.
Still, the current starting page (https://discourse.slicer.org/categories) looks much nicer to me.
Does google search the discourse site?
Looks like they specifically disabled the aggregate search mode for sort-by-likes a few years ago because: likes are a pain to aggregate so skip 
That does look good. (FWIW, the default top ordering weights by several factors including likes and views)
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Yes, google indexes this forum. About 70% of page views originates from google search, about 25% direct links (most probably clicks from email notifications), and the remaining few percent is from github, twitter, researchgate, etc. So, about 3x more people find posts through google search than following links in email notifications.
An update about the encounter with discourse support: instead of answering, they deleted or otherwise made unaccessible the whole topic: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-q-a-plugin-for-sorting-posts-with-the-most-likes-at-the-top/8414
I think it’s safe to say that it’s not just a case of being on the other side of the fence…
Incredible. Well, I say - that is definitely NOT the precedent we should follow!
Would never expect that kind of attitude from a co-founder of a platform that is intended to enable communication, mutual understanding and collaboration.
I can’t believe it’s been actually deleted (if it is then I’m shocked). I’ve asked what happened, we’ll see if we get response: https://meta.discourse.org/t/cannot-find-a-topic/89626
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I apologize for that statement - I should not jump to conclusions. In that topic we were in communication with the forum user that had a label “co-founder”, but I don’t have any evidence that user is responsible for the fact that the topic is no longer accessible.
Well they deleted that ‘topic’ as well 
I received this response in email then apparently the topic got deleted:
sam Sam Saffron co-founder June 12
lassoan: I would recommend improving discourse to make polite deletion/clean-up of topics as effortless as a hard, immediate delete.
Technically nothing needs to change in Discourse. I undeleted said topic, closed it, added a message and scheduled it for deletion in 4 days. All of this is built in to Discourse.
Forcing “unconditional”, mega polite delete is overkill and can lead to loss aversion which is less than ideal.
This level of dancing is not usually required but I guess in this case we can be a little more prudent.
This answer condescending but makes sense. Discourse guy are also really nice because they provide Slicer forum hosting for free and they have developed a great tool that they offer to anyone for free. The only thing that does not make sense to me is that it seems that on their forum when they consider a discussion to be finished then they delete the entire topic. There is a good chance that other people have complained, too, but we know what happens to such topics.
Several of the main Discourse people also created StackOverflow, and it seems they have carried over a similar philosophy: strictly one issue per topic, delete/close early and often.
(they do have >30,000 users on just that site, as compared to 1000 here, so I can understand a degree of expedient moderation. but it sure would be nice to have a brief explanation rather than the generic “page not found” when that happens!)