Getting more topics marked as solved

Hey all,

Since a few weeks we added the option to mark a topic as resolved.

In the future we want to use this feature to quickly give forum members a list of unsolved topics. This way anyone can dive right in and help fellow community members who are looking for answers.

But as the option is now not used a lot, this creates too many false positives to be useful…

What do you think is a good way to get more topics marked as solved?

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I would suggest to make up such list. Then, try to reach topic starters to find their topic in the list and mark the most relevant answer they got. This way, if a new user searches for the same problem, he has more chance to find a solution.

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I am now looking to see how we can create lists that provide more insight as to where help is required.

Some tests:

I think list of unresolved topics only make sense within the FP1 and FP2 help topics and even then there will always be false positives because some topics represent issues that come up again and again and there is often not one solution for all people who have this issue.
E.g. today you marked this post of mine as the solution in a topic with 236 replies 62.2k views and 76users. I don’t think my post qualifies as a solution to all of them.

PS: You’d also have to exclude closed topics in the list somehow, or you’ll have all the duplicate topics that were moved in the list too.

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Yeah, I was testing with your topic to see if this makes sense. Clearly the answer provided should be an answer to the question or problem raised by the Original Poster (OP), not to all the issues raised in the entire topic.

To follow up on your remarks, I made 3 new lists:

These could even be added to the top-menu…

I don’t fully agree here. We have lots of topics where the solution for the OP was e.g. sending the phone in for repair. If we marked the post that suggested that as the solution then the hundred others who posted in the same topic think there is nothing else they can do. And that won’t exactly help with support’s backlog. :wink:

You used “status:open” & “status:noreplies”. Now it only shows topics without replies. If you want both open is enough, since all noreplies topics are open unless they are wikis.

I just remembered back when I didn’t have a Fairphone yet I sometimes asked questions in the apple support forum. :blush:
There - when creating a new topic - you were asked whether you wanted to to post this thread as a question. If you did you could mark replies as solutions or helpful answers, if you didn’t you couldn’t and your tread wouldn’t be shown in the unsolved issues list.
This was obviously a more complicated plugin - people even got points for solutions and helpful answers - but maybe the discourse tags plugin could be tweaked a little so we could simply exclude some topics, so they won’t show up in unsolved?

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Yeah, the apple forum is very sophisticated…

We kinda have to roll here with what is developed over at meta.discourse.com
If you happen to find nice solutions there that could help us here: please share.

I don’t like the search results view very much, the list of topics with the same tag is much better.
One problem with the search results view is that it is always limited to 50 results.
I just used some of the lists above to create the #unsolved tag.
We can use the lists you created above + add “after:date” with the date being the last time we moved topics to #unsolved to keep on populating the tag. (This is a search for unsolved FP2 help topics created after today)
Topics can easily be excluded in the list by removing the tag.

Problems:

  • I can’t adequately populate the #unsolved tag now as all searches I’d use only yield 50 results.
  • Topics with no replies get bumped when excluding them in a batch-add-tag-action or when removing tags. (e.g. when excluding wikis or very old topics - bumping very old topics is not good)

Not only the search view is limited. The tags view is actually limited to 20 days or so. That really blows. Having 72 topics marked as #wiki doesn’t have the right effect if only 10 actually show up.

EDIT: Now the tags view shows all topics (again?). :tada:
So now here are all the unsolved topics: #unsolved

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