ok gents

anyone considered the filter out question I posed, my idea worth heaps of money, heh heh

I even noticed some dude called Jeremy scoring some zero replies......

How about a filter that does not search certain forums?

And maybe when something is submitted to a certain forum, that needs mods to post, the mods change the title to include a keywork so in future, searching is excluded from the filter search?

still my idea, heh heh,

How about No-reply Needed in the title?

eg person A submits a howto that needs mods intervention called howto to chat on the net
Mod changes title to
Howto to chat on the net- No-reply Needed

comment no matter how I say it .....it may seem rude to some that the title has to change to suit 1100 pages of no replies but its only an idea as you are unable to allow posters to put SOLVED in their own titles.

thanks for sharing my time

Certain forums are already filtered. Filtering by something like title just isn't scalable as it requires manual intervention.

--jeremy

I just posted a response to one of Jeremy's 4 year old posts so that it won't show as a no response any more. I'm not going to go through 1100 pages of that, but I can do one, chris can do one, jeremy can do one....

I'll try to do that as well, hopefully with something constructive/related to the posts.

Why not just filter out all zero-reply posts that are older than 1 year just like the main search?

I don't think threads more than one year will still be looked upon for a reply by the Original Poster.

there's really no point in answerign really old threads for the sake of it. we're not concerned with how many there are, what's done is done. we just want to slow the rate that new ones get added to the pile.

One thing that i'm noticing about the thread bumps is that if i see a question that i wouldn't normally answer, and it's not been bumped, i'll more than likely still not answer. however if it comes round after 16 hours, i may well have a go, as no one else tried yet, and again so with 32 hours. again, currently the threads come back up at 44 minutes past the hour, so it's easy to spot them if you want to.

After all of the information I've gleaned from this site over the last year and a half, I decided to try and do my bit to help out. Most of the questions I have absolutely no hope of answering but, I have been able to chip in on quite a few. It has actually become kind of a challenge. I've learned things I never before had to by making myself research answers. Publicising this feature was a _great_ idea.

Would there be a way to make such a notice more visible always? We had a big drop in unanswered posts at first. Now that the notice is not at the top of the home page the number is going back up - quickly. Maybe there was a record number of new members? Or maybe the need to focus on answering new posts is not front and center in the minds of members after the notice moved down the page.

This site has become an unparalleled resource in the Linux community. I think prompting members (like me) to venture further from the cocoon of the one or two focused sub-forums they usually visit will only make Linux Questions even better.

I'm open to ideas on how to better promote this feature (and other features/LQ resources for that matter).

--jeremy

I rarely leave the safety of the wireless networking subforum! My ideas:

-a mention in the next podcast about the 0 post rss feed
-easier access to the link, perhaps by adding it to the Main menu section
-reminder that an affero/thanks click doesnt necessarily need to involve money, just a thankyou is always nice.

I know this would probably be a pain to implement but how about the ability to set the status of a thread to "resolved". Not sure on this one - perhaps only the thread starte could do this or be open to anyone to change the state. I think I need to download vBulletin and play about with some stuff myself.
Regards
Chris

Great idea, and a good way to get questions that scroll off the front page answered; bookmarked.

However, the number WILL grow and pass 1100 since the search returns both announcements and questions.

To lower the number, we would need a "me too" or "that's nice" response to each such announcement, or marking such announcements so that an enhanced version of this query does not find them.

I did mention this in the last Podcast. I'll also mention it in the next Community Bulletin.

--jeremy

We need a companion piece to the ESR article, like "How to answer questions the smart way". Written for LQ.org users, but general enough to apply to any technical discussion. I think more members would use the 0-post list if they had ways of making question-answering fun and educational, instead of tedious and repetitive (as it often is).

For example:

Don't blow off stupid questions. Not everyone has an innate knowledge of how to ask questions the smart way. Some may be asking questions using a non-native tongue, and may not have adequate vocabulary to properly express their questions. Try to encourage better question-asking--if not directly, then through the form of your response. For example, someone asks "Why did my web browser stop working?"; you might reply "Let me know what browser you are using (Firefox, mozilla, Konqueror) and when it stopped working. Was it soon after you installed another program or made some change to your system files?" Here, the question-asker is encouraged to do some troubleshooting on his own, and to learn to be more specific.

You can often be smart, and infer a lot from the form of the question. Is the grammar atrocious? Is the spelling slightly off? You might be dealing with someone who is using a secondary language. Don't assume they are morons; they may just have trouble with proper expression in that language. Anyone who has learned a second language knows it can be very frustrating knowing what you want to say, but not how to say it. Computer programmers should know all about this frustration, too--think about how hard it was when you were learning a new programming language. You may have had concepts in your head that you just didn't have the language comprehension to express. Be patient.

In a typical educational model, knowledge is passed down, unidirectionally, from respondent to questioner--teacher to student. But the exchange is much more rewarding when both parties learn from the experience. Try not to treat questions as a form of trivia, and say "Oh, I know that one." Learn something by answering the question; if you nominally know the answer to the question, you may benefit by learning more about the topic yourself. Research it a little, and become able to answer the question thoroughly. Of course, as you learn more, many questions will simply be a case of "Oh, I know that one", but each time it happens you will be better equipped to answer the question clearly.

You will learn even more if you try to answer difficult questions. Many questions require study and problem-solving to properly answer. The question itself may be in a field that you know a lot about, but may still require some thinking and research; you will hone your problem-solving skills by answering such questions. If the question is on a topic that you have no familiarity with, you may still be able to provide a partial answer by doing some research on that new topic and summarizing your findings.

This could probably be expanded to make a real article of it

wapcaplet, we'd be happy for you to submit somethign like that as a LinuxAnswer, BUT... who will read it? the point with all these generally good ideas, full of good information, are simply ignored by the people who most need to read them. it's totally implicit in the nature of their poor posts etc...

Again, probably asking too much here but how about a script with this that fires before/after the first time a newly registered member posts?

fires where? a good thing to think about with these sort of scenario's is "how would i react to that?" let's say YOU join some web forum... YOU get sent an email with the rules on. do YOU read it? obviosuly some people would, but i know i wouldn't, so how can i expect anyone else to?