Building a Repository of Discussion Posts

[Ivan J]

Hello, 

I am currently planning to use Confluence to build a repository of discussion posts that can either be a combination of decisions or announcements that need to be made.

This will probably have 200+ discussion posts, and I am trying to avoid having 200 plus pages showing on the sidebar. 

I am looking at the format of Atlassian Community's homepage layout of how different filters can be applied to search for discussion topics--and this seems perfect. Is there a macro that can be developed for this particular use on Confluence? Or alternatively, another solution to how I could organize these 200 plus discussion pages, and have search functions would work too. 

I thought of one solution:Creating "start a new discussion" or "start a new decision" button, and purposely make that page an orphan page (not sure if this is OK to do for 200 plus pages) so it does not show on the sidebar and let the user set labels so they can be findable by the search pages by label macro (Is it possible for this macro to list 100+ hits? is it possible to set a pre-defined list of labels for the user to choose from?). I would need help in creating these two buttons, as I do not have coding experience and am a first-time Confluence user...

Could someone provide advice/guidance/feedback? Anything helps. Thanks!