highlighting correct answers in threads

[Darg]

I'm not sure vBulletin supports this, but I was thinking how useful it would be to have a feature where, for example, in the WC3 help forum, when someone posts a question to which they get a whole series of responses, that the original poster can then go and nominate the post(s) which helped them resolve the issue.

There would then be a special icon next to the thread topic in the forum which indicates that the question has received an acceptable solution.

If anyone has ever used Experts Exchange before, you'll know its a convenient way to filter through all the responses and see which one(s) were the most useful. It's also a great way to avoid wasting time figuring out which questions have / have not received acceptable answers yet.

I don't think this is possible to do, but it's still a handy feature to have.

For those who want a better idea of what I mean, I encourage you to try this: go over to the World Editor Help forum, and have a look at all the threads on the first page. Now, some of those threads have received solutions, and some of them haven't - can you tell which ones are which ?

 

[undeadorcjerk]

Thats a very good idea. It would be cool to see that.

 

[AceHart]

"Experts Exchange"? ...

Anyway, http://www.thehelper.net/forums/showthread.php?t=82925

 

[TheDamien]

Anything which brings any website closer to experts exchange is a bad thing, in my view.

 

[PurgeandFire]

Anything which brings any website closer to experts exchange is a bad thing, in my view.

Why? Elaborate otherwise that post is practically useless.

I believe it is a positive idea. This will help more people. But I don't think there is a script to do this so wouldn't this add more workload to the moderators? (unless you trust the users, but not all of them will mark a post as a solution anyway)

Its kind of neutral. There is like 40 threads or so a day in the WE help Zone, and it would kind of be hard marking each one if it has a solution.

 

[Darg]

Thanks for that reading material Ace. I guess the one thing I would say is that I am not a fan of the rep system, because it focuses on the posters rather than their answers. If you give rep to someone, only that person knows about it. If (in theory) you indicated an answer was correct, then everyone would know about it.

> Anything which brings any website closer to experts exchange is a bad thing, in my view.

You've interpreted the idea the wrong way. Experts Exchange always gets bagged out because they force you to sign up to just see solutions. But that has got nothing to do with the discussion point here.

> Its kind of neutral. There is like 40 threads or so a day in the WE help Zone, and it would kind of be hard marking each one if it has a solution.

You raise a good point, it cannot fall onto moderators to do anything like this, it would have to be up to the users. And trusting users to do it isn't always the reliable way to go.

Anyway, I guess we're just discussing theories or ideologies here, I think my real intention is to encourage some discussion about better ways to manage the large volume of threads we get in the WE help forum these days. It's a bit worrying that threads take hours, rather than days, to run off the first page. And once that happens, the number of people reading your question drops off. It's also hard to keep track of the "state" of threads as a result, I really can't tell if a thread is active, idle, still waiting on responses etc.

So if anyone has ideas to combat the above problem, I'm all ears.

 

[AceHart]

> If (in theory) you indicated an answer was correct, then everyone would know about it.

Certainly.
The big "problem" I'm seeing here is simply "who would do it?".
And who would use it?
The number of people that search and read the 200+ threads they find, based on keywords like "hero" or "help me"... is limited at best.
It would also have to show outside the thread, search results, forum view, ... a major edit to the forum software.

Basically, it would be more of a statistical value than an actual help.


No, I have no brilliant plan either, other than the usual world domination plan I'm working on, but that doesn't really go in this thread...