Hey Fweeb,
I saw you at the Bconf, you’re a really cool guy.
Anyway I talked to you about the fact that many solved problems are not marked as [SOLVED] because people don’t think of it.
In fact there are so many that whenever I want to give some help I basically search for threads with 0 replies only, so if people got some replies which were not helpful, they probably won’t get much more help (at least from me).
BUT, how about sending a notification or mail to the author after a while if the thread got some replies, saying something like this :
“You asked for help on blenderartists.org on october 15th 2016 about “texture doesn’t appear in viewport or whatever”
Did you find the answer you were looking for ?
If so, please don’t forget to mark your thread as solved.
To do so, go to your first post, click on “edit post”, then on “Go advanced” and select the prefix “[SOLVED]” in the dropdown menu.
Thanks for your participation to the Blender community !”
Would that be possible ? Do you find it too intrusive ?
This is a pretty clever idea. The forum will already email you (based on your preferred settings) if one of your subscribed threads has a reply. It probably wouldn’t be very difficult to add a feature like the one you’re describing.
That said, the question is whether people want the forum to email them. I’d personally find it helpful, but I may be an outlier.
The other option that I’ve seen used in forums is for moderators (and other members of the forum) to more actively recommend that OPs mark their threads as SOLVED when they find a solution. Perhaps when we eventually migrate to Discourse, we can have some kind of incentive built-in for that behavior.
Next problem related to that is when a user posts his first thread, the notification about moderation goes away so fast that people miss it and are again asking website support “where my post go?”.
I made a tutorial on how to post support questions. None of that information is visible to new users to help them ask their questions properly, getting help, and handling the thread. They ask their questions poorly, and they don’t mark the thread as solved because: they don’t know it’s possible, don’t know how, they have to really hunt the information.
If you want people to send support files and mark their thread as solved, make the controls to those visible, in an obvious location, and straight-forward to use. The bar above a thread has dropdowns that contains controls I’ve never used. It could have controls everyone uses all the time and change depending on the context of the forum/thread if needed.
The whole forum is about visual arts so it would make sense to have things visible the very least, or even go as far as using composition techniques to plan how that visual information is organized. After that start sending an email about something a user didn’t do and get it received as helpful instead of as nuisance.