Interesting.  So how would you decide which posts are related?  Would you just pull the most recent “X” posts from the same forum?  Where would the links to those posts go?

Thanks.

I would assume it uses keywords but I really don’t know. I am a non-techy person.

The Yuzo plugin is fantastic on the blog side.  My site has been live since 2005. I write daily and the plugin reliably pulls up relevant content. It’s astonishing good at discerning what to feature. This is why I mentioned Simple:Press rolling into wordpress.  I’d rather keep the forum “related content” separate from the blog side but it gives me hope.

This might give a clue

https://wordpress.org/plugins/related-posts-by-taxonomy/

I really hate the all the content on the forum side is inaccessible for the most part.. or at least it was until Google started indexing it (again) pretty aggressively.  But helping the user with “related topics” would be ideal.

Just putting my ideas out here… there is another forum site, like mine in that people go there to visit, commune and discuss and such. They have a lot of content and they offer access via a two tiered search (that is very good).

You have the option to search recent content (maybe the last 30  days or so).  But if you want to search the entire archive you can do that as well.  As a user, these tools work well enough. They satisfy.

The Simple:Press search has never been effective (sorry).  Google search (custom, which is on my site) fills in. But you see what I’m saying here. It you want to amp up your product, this will do it.

To try to answer your question about where to place the links, my old plugin, to the best of my recollection, make them prominent.

It was a simple bullet list.

• other topic
• related thing here
• another interesting thing to read

Three or four suggestions would be plenty.  I guess the logical place to put them is at the bottom of the page. You read everything and then click to something else that catches your eye.

You can see how the yuzo plugin looks.. it’s pulls in the featured pics.  But frankly, the FUNCTION is the most important thing. The bullet list worked beautifully.

Just to wrap up, the other user on this forum mentioned that he was using Simple:Press for mini-blog posts due to the google situation at this time. I am doing the same thing.  I did not have a name for what I was doing, but I have caught on to the fact that I can post in the forum and be seen.

So basically, these forums that are “dying”?  They’re not. They are coming back strong at this time.  And right now, I can get the user to the site via google. With a related posts plugin, I could keep them there…

edit to add..

here is another possible source of info

https://wordpress.org/plugins/contextual-related-posts/

have you looked at the Tags plugin?  with in it is a feature to see related posts based on the tags (ie keywords)…

Yes, I’ve had that plugin for several years. People tag posts, at times. But no one clicks the tags…that I know of. I don’t click them and I am the heaviest user there is.

To refresh the content, I search with google and then place links on twitter, or just bump the threads up myself.  This is my workaround.. it’s cumbersome and I guess i’d just say if I could do by clicking tags, I would.

if they wont use Tags, how would they use Keywords (or taxonomy)?

I am not sure of the proper technical terms but a title to a topic is more compelling than a tag.

• Modern Dating – Are Women too Picky?
• What Happens When Blah Does Blah..

I don’t understand how one of these plugins chooses the related content but if you are searching for info on anything, if there is a handy link, you’re likely to click it and stay on the site.

For example, on my site someone might want to know about dating a Sagittarius man.  If they arrive by search and then see various other links to related content, they will, click them, as opposed to backing out of the site, back to the search page they came from and choosing another link there.

Again, all the content sites… news sites or whatever, are littered with links to related content because they work. I don’t want a cluttered site and if there a fewer choices they are more likely to be actually related. But the impact of something like this cannot be denied.

Still wishing for this! It’s really necessary to make a site, sticky.  It’s also more and more, becoming the norm.  As an example, google search presents related (forum) posts:

 I wonder if there is anything new on this with simplepress.

Thanks.

Hi:

This is not something on our road-map at this time.  We’ve released a number of new plugins and features this year.  Most of those were based on surveys that we did earlier in the year.  But what we’ve found is that what users say they want in those surveys and what they’re actually buying are two different things.  So we’ve raised the bar on what it will take to add a new major feature – we’re not going to add something unless we get a really large amount of interest.  Right now this feature does not meet that bar.  We have the rough draft of the specs ready for development but so far very little interest in it (maybe you and a couple of other users only so far.)

Thanks.

Thanks for the clear and candid response. It’s appreciated. 🙂