It seems to me that (at least for many of the more common users here) most of this community is driven by helping one another voluntarily. This means that, usually, a person must read an entire thread to see if the poster still needs help with his situation.
This is why I think there should be someway of marking threads as resolved. So for example, there could be an option in the Post Reply page that-if the user is the poster of the thread-he or she can check the "Mark as resolved" box, and a "[RESOLVED]" would automatically be prepended to the thread title. This would mean that another user browsing the forums would know not to spend his time reading that thread because the poster has solved their problem (or if he's otherwise interested in reading it). Thus, they can help others instead of reading through a thread to find the poster has solved their problem.
How difficult would this be to implement in vBulletin (especially that which runs this forum)? Also, what would the increase to costs (maintenence, hackin vBulletin to add it, etc.) and benefits be?
I was just curious about this because I saw a similar request on the Gentoo Linux discussion forums and thought it may be a good idea to implement on Dev Shed, or at least an idea to put forth to the Admins who run it.
Thanks in advance.
--Peter
I disagree, I don't think enough users would bother to use it, it would end up like Experts-Exchange and would require people (mods) to chase up threads and see if they've been resolved or not - manually adding the marker.
This has though been discussed before and shot down several times from what I can see ;)
Yea. Now that I think about it it's probably not such a great idea after all. *sigh* I must need more caffeine. :)
Thansk for the input...
I saw this same thing brought up at a different forum, but it was actually implemented.... seems to be working OK last I checked....
but computer's right (for once :p ), it would be too difficult and time consuming for mods to run around seeing what is/isn't answered.... plus what if someone opens up a new related question in that thread after it's been marked "resolved"? ;)
I kinda agree with the idea in general. There are a few regular users who go about locking their threads when they're resolved which I don't care for because there can be follow-up on it. It might help alleviate this if that existed.
Beyond that I'm utterly impartial.
Maybe it would just be better if standard users [i.e. not mods]
didn't have the privs to close their threads...
I kinda agree with the idea in general. There are a few regular users who go about locking their threads when they're resolved which I don't care for because there can be follow-up on it. It might help alleviate this if that existed.
Beyond that I'm utterly impartial.
I agree - there's been a number of times I've wanted to correct an answer from someone else or add a suggestion or something but the original poster's locked the thread.
This leads to people taking the quickest answer rather than the best solution.
thinking about it a little more, a good place where this _would_ would would be the Webhosting Requests forum. We often get people there (the OP's) posting "Yeah, we have made a decision now, please stop posting offers!" and sometimes still people post offers. Sometimes people request to the mods to have their threads closed or work out how to do it themselves.
If you could perhaps find a hack that'd allow people to mark a thread as being resolved in just that forum it might work, as long as we inform everyone (ie, a sticky titled "Once you have found a host...") to get peoples attention...