An idea
 

Hello, I know you are alway looking for ideas for the site and I had a brainstorm. I belong to yahoo, and find my liking the answers part of the site. Now here is my idea.

I know for legal reasons you could not copy the answers site at yahoo, but at the same time I think it would be neat here at LQ. Each question has a sub category that the question belongs to. This would make it where content on LQ would be sorta static maybe for a lack of a word. So picture this:

You have the forums, which is a huge resource for the users. But when you come to the main page you could be faced with a list of recently asked questions. This list could be in constant refresh and someone coming to LQ could quickly answer the question and it can be thrown in a "pool". Now someone comes here and does a search like we all want any user to do before posting. The results of the search are split like this:

Your search for ????? returned these results:
There could be a list of ten result from the forums, with a click here for more results. The another section could contain 10 results from the answers or whatever with a option to click here to view them. You could include results from the wiki in the search, and maybe even somehow pool the blogs or something.

I find it kinda fun to use yahoo answers, kinda breaks the monotony of a forum. Just an idea to see what people think. Might take alot to implement but would be a neat way for people to get fast answers none the less.

Sounds like someone with broadband...

At the moment - there is the 0 reply threads thing in the Main Menue to the right there. OK - I prefered it at the top of the page... and putting "most recent ten unanswered questions" on the entry page is an interesting idea.

However - as it stands, it takes 1-5 mins for one of my searches to load. When it does, I get everything in the database back to the beginning. That's plenty thanks.

If a search comes up nada a "sarch the wiki" may be nice but irrelevant to me.

And, I don't like yahoo - sorry.

I'll poke around Yahoo!/Google answers when I get a chance and see if there are any ideas we can use. We do have something on the horizon that I think could change how everyone uses the forums, but that's all I'll say about that ;) The 0 reply thread link is in the main menu to the right and in the Quick Links up top, just as an FYI. Lastly, we are looking into some potential wiki integration...but are still looking into implementation details a bit. Keep the feedback coming!

--jeremy

what I got from anti-microft's idea was that the search would throw up results from the wiki, answers and forums. (doesn't this do this already?)
Sorted by relevancy, or by categories. So if you searched for open gl won't compile on slackware, you would get links to the wiki entries for open gl, slackware and compiling. You would get the answers guide to compiling. etc, plus any helpful threads.

it sounds like it might be server intensive though.

titanium_geek