Is it possible to allow Guest Posts without having the board explode, or getting gunned down by Spam-Robots?

I'm sure everybody here has come across some Thread where 15 people can't get it right, and you could answer it in a sentence, but you're not a member. Eventually the thread dies, but it will pop up on Google for years to come. And some poor newbie stumbles from unanswered Thread to unanswered Thread until he finally starts one of his own, littering the internet even further...
Some threads simply contain google-friendly phrases, and they make the top lists for good or evil. So more non-members will end up reading them for a long period of time. Guest posts might help answer them quicker, or getting them answered long after the thread has died, but is still being read. (maybe disable bumping for guest entries)


My second thought on this was, that there should be a way to search for unsolved threads - taking the 0-reply-search (which is a great idea) a step further. - To get them answered. Few people mark their threads "solved" in the title. Maybe there could be a simple checkbox - a big flashy one.

well you'd need to know when a thread was solved, if that was a criteria, and that's a really intensive and hard thing to do, nad isn't really what we want to do. it tends to lead to the logic of threads being closed once solved, and things can get really petty.

as for the answered flag stuff, congrats, i think you're the first person this month to suggeste it! your prize is in the post! again it's far far far too much work, if it's down to mods, we couldn't keep up, if it was down to the thread starter it wouldn't (doesn't) get used...

I thought so, but I also thought it could use some more nagging. I don't think it has to be down to the mods. If it was only flashy enough, people might click it. And it's a pretty low-level responsibility. If the original poster forgot, you might pass it on to anyone with 500+ posts. Wrong flagging is the worst that could happen.

there are frameworks like your suggestion that i personally think could work fairly well, but it's not somethign that Jeremy is relly planning on at this time.

It actually came up a couple days ago We do have the "unanswered" tag that the poster can add. I am open to other frameworks, but have not run across any yet that I feel are even remotely usable at our size. As for guest posting, it's not something we're going to enable here at LQ.

--jeremy

thought there was the answered tag...

Does the search have the capabilities to limit results as per tags?

TG

You can search by tag.

--jeremy