Status for Forum Threads

Greetings,

I found that having a "status" flag with forum entries improves forum usability a great deal.
Since there is now an awful lot of entries in the forum, you usually get a large number of hits
for any popular search. Now if the search result screen could indicate whether the original questions/problem
was solved in this thread, or whether it is still unanswered after 20 replies, or whether the poster
had given up, or whether the question itself was nonsense ("error between the headphones", as we say here ;-)
...

(With this, the "find threads with 0 replies" would then be "unanswered with 0 replies" and would REALLY
make sense...)

This is how it could work:
When somebody posts to a help forum, the message is tagged as "Open"/"Unanswered".
(Could default to "N/A" for advocacy forums, news, etc)
When a reply is posted, the thread creator (usually) gets an email notification anyway.
This could include a link (and reminder) to change the status of the thread.
Also, when replying, a combo box (drop-down-select-box) could be offered to change the status.
Only the original poster and the forum admin should be able to set a status.

Feedback appreciated :-)

Cheers,
Tom.

this has been said a hundred times easily... it doesn't work, the thread starters don't bother. it's a nice idea but not worth it for the returns.

Well then, some commerical sites have a "did this article answer your questions?" / "did this help with your problem?" / "please rate this article"
at the end of each page.
Let the community vote on the quality of a thread then...

Cheers, Tom.

We had that one too. As Acid says, thread starters don't tend to add flags and also, with the number of people contributing ideas any one of the posts could be helpful. It's not focused enough to be useful.

You can, however, use relevant tags to do this.

Let the community vote on the quality of a thread then...

You currently can "rate" threads.

--jeremy

Originally Posted by jeremy You currently can "rate" threads. --jeremy

And it's that point that reflects back on the original post really. if you, who was keen enough on this principle to post a thread about it, was not aware that you can use the thread rating functionality, what chnace do the majority of users have?

True!

The "Rate Thread" Button is somehow lost up there, if I may say that from my user experience.
That is because one can rate a thread after finishing reading it. One is at the end of the page then, not on the top.

Placing the Radiobuttons (expanded!) besides/above/below the "Post Quick Reply" would a) make this immediately visible and 2) make thread rating
a one-click-operation...

Cluttering the UI with random functionality placed in multiple places is a bad thing. ALL user actions are lumped together in one spot, in a consistent manner. That's something we try to maintain.

--jeremy

Having it in one place make sense, sure.
But having it on top makes using it quite unintuitive...