I am a regular at MSDN forums, and there is a system there like what you are suggesting. Looking at what they are using there, and trying to figure out how would (or wouldn't) it work here, these are my thoughts:monele wrote:Why not enforce the fact a solved topic should have "solved" added to it? It should be the OP's job, but if not done, it should be asked by people who notice it's missing... and if the OP has sadly disappeared, it should be done by an admin.
And then, when a topic is solved, it could also be closed or at least someone should clearly demand a new topic if there's a new question. It's strict, but it would make searching for things easier in the long run ^^
Thoughts?
- When you get a reply notification by e-mail from MSDN, the message reminds you to mark the post as an answer if it answers your question. Also, whenever a post in a thread you're watching is marked as a good answer, you get a notification as well.
- I generally receive as many notifications of answers marked by the original poster as by admins; which leads to think that only around a half of the users there mark the answers they receive.
- Lots of users, and specially most admins, have something like "remember to mark good answers to your questions as such", and there are also reminders on the posting page and many other places... yet half of users do not mark the answers.
In summary: if LSF had as many resources as MS does, and hence could pay full-time admins to review and mark posts or threads as appropriate, then this approach would be a good idea. But knowing that LSF is mostly based on the voluntary work of people running it; it can't be compared with the wealthiest software vendor in the world.
The idea itself is not bad, it's just that for it to work here it would require admins to commit with ~30h/day of work.
If the user can do something wrong, s/he'll do something even worse. (Murphy's law, applied to Computing)