√ "solved" mark for completed threads

wonblee
I think it will be helpful for the posterity if the OP is allowed to stamp something like a checkmark in front of the thread title if the issue raised in that thread has been solved.
  • adamsmith
    if you want to, you can edit your first post to add [solved] in the title.
  • wonblee
    That's a great idea!
  • aurimas
    Honestly, I dislike when people tag posts as solved (but I may be being a bit selfish here). I use an RSS reader to keep track of all the posts in the forum and when a post's title is edited, every post in the thread becomes marked as unread.

    I also don't see much use in tagging posts as solved. Everyone who's really involved in troubleshooting issues on this forum reads every single thread and we're all aware of when an issue is solved or not. For people that are trying to find a solution to an issue they are having, the easiest thing to do is just go through the most recent hits in their search. All of those threads will at least have a redirect to the most relevant solution.

    Am I missing something? What is the point of the [solved] tag?
  • wonblee
    edited January 25, 2014
    Honestly, I dislike when people tag posts as solved (but I may be being a bit selfish here). I use an RSS reader to keep track of all the posts in the forum and when a post's title is edited, every post in the thread becomes marked as unread.
    Ok, I wasn't aware of that.

    Some other forums make use of the [solved] tag - I think MS Office Forums does - and, personally, I always found that useful. When you run into a problem, you search the threads first, and if some have "solved" stamp in front of them and others do not, I don't bother to read the "unsolved" threads.
  • aurimas
    But often something that was solved a year ago may no longer apply or the solution may even make things worse or just have users running around in circles. This is probably more so for Zotero than other software though.
  • wonblee
    But often something that was solved a year ago may no longer apply or the solution may even make things worse or just have users running around in circles. This is probably more so for Zotero than other software though.
    Worse? How? Stamped "solved" or not, if you are diligently troubleshooting, you'll have to read the entire thread anyway. It's not that a "solved" thread will have the answer at the bottom of the thread; they rarely do. The merit of having a stamp is that you don't have to bother with the threads that even the OP didn't certify as the solution. As a user, I've spent so much time reading useless threads, often many pages long.
  • adamsmith
    mostly I want users to spend little time reading through threads except for feature requests.
    If there is a commonly occurring problem, it should have a knowledge base article. If it's a frequently asked question, it should be documented.
  • aurimas
    I'm just saying that a solved thread from a year ago may lead you in the wrong direction as opposed to a recent thread without a "solved" tag (mostly because only 1% of users bother marking something as solved). So what I'm suggesting is that you should just read the most recent threads mentioning your issue and 9 times out of 10 you'll either find a solution, a redirect to a solution, or there will be troubleshooting steps for you to take.
  • dstillman
    I believe that Faolan is planning to upgrade us to Vanilla 2 relatively soon, and that supports things like marking a post as a "Best Answer" that shows at the top of the thread.
  • dstillman
    edited January 25, 2014
    Honestly, I dislike when people tag posts as solved (but I may be being a bit selfish here). I use an RSS reader to keep track of all the posts in the forum and when a post's title is edited, every post in the thread becomes marked as unread.
    (The entry id in the feed doesn't include the title, so in a properly behaving feed reader title changes technically shouldn't affect previous messages. FWIW, I've always used Thunderbird for the forums, which is the only feed reader I've ever found (at least for OS X) that does message threading (which does depend on the title staying the same, so yes, title changes are a little annoying in that way, but read state is unaffected regardless). These days I actually use rssdrop (with some small modifications, I think) to regularly pull the feed to an IMAP server, so that all posts are saved even if I don't open Thunderbird for a while. That also makes it possible to use any mail client to manage the feed.)
  • dstillman
    wonblee: Now that you've started doing this regularly, I'm actually going to agree with aurimas here that it's actually more annoying than helpful. While it doesn't affect read state of the whole thread for me, it does separate the last message from all the others, which makes it harder to keep track of things. So I would prefer if you would just leave solved threads alone. Vanilla 2 may offer other solutions here that don't affect the forum feed.
  • wonblee
    Got it. I meant for it to boost productivity, so if it counters productivity, there is no reason to continue the practice.

    I'll look forward to Vanilla 2.
  • RintzeRintze
    Vanilla 2 has some Q&A oriented plugins:

    http://vanillaforums.org/addon/qna-plugin
    http://vanillaforums.org/addon/voting-plugin
    http://vanillaforums.org/addon/tagging-plugin
  • dstillman
    Vanilla 2 has built-in Q&A support as a post type, but we'll have to see if it actually makes sense to use it. (Vanilla 2 has a lot of great-looking stuff.)
  • RintzeRintze
    I don't know if any work has been done for moving to Vanilla 2, but Discourse (http://www.discourse.org/) seems pretty promising as well.

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