Suggested Idea for making forums easier to navigate.

[mattkenefick]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this or not and I apologize ahead of time.

You guys don't have time to build in an extra feature to this forum do you? I think it would be real nice to give authors the ability to say that a certain thread is solved or not.

I'm sure some of you have been on experts-exchange. We don't need "Grading" but I think it would be nice to have a mark next to the topic saying that they got their answer or not.

I was going through trying to help people with few replies, and ran into like 4 "Thank you very much" threads in a row. Which is fine but I was just searchin for stuff that hasn't been solved yet ya know?

Just an idea.

[Jesse]

There's a really long thread from about 12 months ago which discusses the topic of marking threads closed / solved. Ultimately we opted not to go for it, as it complicates the re-opening of threads, and there was no stable hack to support it. I think any sites which have it have very customized hacks, and since we like to stay up on the latest updates for security reasons and the like, it wasn't practical.

[mattkenefick]

Oh. I did not know.

I think closing / re-opening would be too complicated as well.

But what about making the thread icon change to something. A bright colored letter "A","B","C","D","F" for the answer they gave to the thread. It doesn't have to "Close" but it can be labeled for the change.

If it needs to be custom, can do that. I'm a php programmer.

[Jesse]

Sorry I don't get you. Do you mean that the person who asks the question sets some sort of setting when they think the question has been answerred, and that setting controls the color of the letter icon?

[CyanBlue]

I'm all for whatever method we can have to implement some sort of 'resolved' mark... Of course, I know Jesse and Strok are real busy... Dear Santa... Can you clone those two bright souls for us lowly AS.org people??? That'd be awesome present for this X-mas...

[mattkenefick]

Yes basically. The owner of the thread, or moderator, gets to edit the icon of the thread. So they start out with the thumbs up or the face or whatnot, then there is a button on their thread somewhere that says "mark this as resolved" or "Mark this as Resolved Well, Resolved Poorly, etc" and it'll just simply change the icon of the thread.

All it has to do is run an UPDATE query to change the icon of the thread.

Then all we have to do when looking through threads is looking for an icon that hasn't been resolved yet.

Originally Posted by Jesse

Sorry I don't get you. Do you mean that the person who asks the question sets some sort of setting when they think the question has been answerred, and that setting controls the color of the letter icon?

[mattkenefick]

If you can point me in the direction of where to find some of the code for this particular forum or what not, I'd be happy to build the extension.

I don't have this particular forum in my collection of applications actually but it shouldn't take more than a few hours to build this extension if you're into the idea.