Suggestions...'Solved' posts & accepted solutions

Just a couple of thoughts

Would it be a good idea to have the facility to show that a post had been regarded as 'solved'.

Occasionally, when i get to browse the forums looking to help other users, I often visit posts to which a solution has already been posted.

Also, how about having an 'accepted solution' for common problems, for example, I see the 'Dreamweaver Cache' question appear nearly every day.

I was thinking the same thing, but I couldn't think of a good way to implement it. Many times something appears to be solved and then another issue arises. Sometimes someone else has a better solution than the one already posted.

The number of times we give out the same solution indicates that people aren't really looking before posting anyway. Even if I end up in a post that's already been solved, I often take away new information from the post.

I try to update the Solving Problems with Dreamweaver guide with as much new information as possible. This way the self-help types have everything they need in one place, and if we point someone to a solution that doesn't help, they might find one that does without having to go back to the forum.

I keep this page wa/ open in the background to answer questions quickly. When that doesn't solve the problem, at least it gives people a good starting point for further investigation.

I appreciate the suggestions! I'm not sure how to do the solved threads idea either since threads do get appended to frequently and then need to be resolved again. If we forgot to toggle off and on some status that the thread was solved (assuming that's something we could do within vBulletin anyhow), I'm afraid we might cause more problems than it would be worth. I'll keep thinking about this one.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by having an accepted solution. I mean, I know we have accepted solutions to problems (i.e. Dreamweaver cache), but how would you identify those? I agree that people are not always self-helping or we wouldn't see such repetitive threads. We also have documentation on common installation issues like these in multiple places... and yet, people still post the issue over and over.

The tech support team does its best to link to threads where the issue has been solved instead of re-answering the same question again and again. This is a time saver but furthermore, we are trying to educate people that there is a lot of info already on the forum and self-helping/searching will likely get a quicker answer than being 1 of 200+ threads we need to solve each week.

We would like to keep people on the forum as much as possible as opposed to sending them elsewhere. We believe this gets them in the habit of searching the forums for solutions and getting more familiar with the support section of our website, where we have so much help content accessible.

I think we are dealing with two types of people:

1. People that look for ways to find answers
   
2. People that will ask questions before looking at any resource

The KB allows us to answer common questions with a simple link. Type 1 people soon learn that they can find other things there that they can use on their own. Type 2 people are always going to ask the question regardless of the resources available to them.

The PDFs are needed as a starting point, but are cumbersome to update and time-consuming to download to see if the issue is covered. I point back to the WA resources whenever possible, but it's hard to keep track of what's there. The new format that groups all resources for a product is a huge improvement over the past but it's still hard to scan through PDFs.

I found several instances of people that were not even aware of the extra stuff in their download area. I would think that people would want everything they paid for, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I think the solution is to just accept the fact that there will always be type1 and type 2 people and cater to both. Searching the forum works for those that are familiar with it, but I don't think you are going to covert the user that just wants their issue resolved as quickly as possible.

In the end it all comes down to customer experience. If their problem is resolved quickly, I don't think they care were it comes from.

I think you've touched on a very valid point, i noticed today that a couple of FAQ's turned up again.

What prompted the original question was a recent visit to the adobe forums, which have a means of allowing the person who originally posted, the option of marking the thread as 'answered'

Everyone has raised great points here.

I do like Craig's idea though of an "accepted solution" similar to what is done on the experts exchange forum merely from the standpoint that it would also speed up the process of finding out which threads still require input and which ones have already been dealt with sufficiently.

Then the common problems like the cache issue, I'm afraid, will always show up in the threads because it can happen when installing any of the extensions - which is part of the reason why it gets posted so many times and in so many different places. Perhaps, because the cache problem is an inherent issue with Dreamweaver CS4, maybe WebAssist should make it sticky at the very top of every extension thread and title it appropriately like, "How to fix JavaScript DW cache error" - or something that relates to what is commonly displayed by the error.

Best regards,

Brian

Thanks again for the feedback. I posted a "notice" on the cache issue - this shows at the top of the forums under Notices and is dismissible (you can click on the red x if you are logged in).

Then I also posted an "announcement" in the Dreamweaver Extensions section - meaning one post goes at the top of every forum within that section. This save redundancy of the same thread in a bunch of different places, which would probably look kind of sloppy if people are using the New Posts link or using RSS to read threads.

Hopefully these two things will also allow people to help themselves before they get frustrated. I agree that some people will always post before they read ANYTHING but this is that much more obvious and maybe we can decrease the number of those folks at least a bit.