Re: Solved? (aka "More On Thankfulness")

It is an interesting idea, but given the proportion of SoPW nodes where it can never be applied (i.e. all those from years past, along with all the new ones posted by AnonyMonk), it might end up causing enough confusion to offset the "advantage" of reducing the number of "thank you" replies; e.g. newcomers basing their first impressions on a superficial review will wonder why so many nodes don't seem to get "solved".

(I'm not sure I understand the objection that some monks have against people posting a sub-reply saying "thanks, this has fixed my problem". Sure it may be unnecessary, but where's the harm to the Monastery? If such replies are "wasting valuable node space", why does PM retain useless replies to the "opinion poll" nodes? What makes those more valuable than "thank you" replies?)

I suppose there could be some risk that monks who are just trying to be helpful might see "SOLVED" in the SoPW title and decide to skip over the node -- and thereby kill any chance that they might be able to post a better solution, or learn something from the solution(s) already posted.

OTOH, the most effective users of the site will simply learn to ignore this sort of label, because they know there's a chance they might be able to post a better solution, or at least learn something from the solution(s) already posted.

Either way, I'd tend to conclude that putting "SOLVED" labels on nodes is unlikely to yield enough of a positive payoff to justify the effort of encouraging and supporting it.

Now, if the (non-AM) OP-owner of a given SoPW thread had the ability to add some flag to the titles of replies that were especially helpful, this might be a nice touch that could reduce or even eliminate those nasty little "thank you" replies...

(I'm not sure what sort of flag would be suitable, and I assume this sort of facility would require a relatively complicated patch, and would simply pose another challenge to newcomers who already need to ramp up on a lot of PM-specific administrivia. So forget I even mentioned this.)

Comment on Re: Solved? (aka "More On Thankfulness")

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Re^2: Solved? (aka "More On Thankfulness") by etcshadow (Priest) on Jun 28, 2005 at 04:12 UTC
Well, what retitling would accomplish that "thank-you" replies would not is: visiting monks would be able to quickly see which questions were outstanding from, say, the recently active threads/newest nodes screens. As for the fact that this wouldn't be retroactive... who cares? The benefit of doing it would be achieved even if it weren't retroactive (since the benefit applies to active threads). Furthermore, there's no need to do any development... It could simply begin as convention. It might take some time to get the "critical mass" behind the convention, but if a good number of monks really started doing this, it might just catch. If at some point in the (distant?) future, we all decided that there should be some sort of deliberate functionality around it, and someone has the time and energy and ability to code it... great! But if that never happens, or doesn't happen for a long time, it doesn't really change anything. The analog that comes to my mind is how we gradually mutated from the (default) title of replies to replies changing from: "Re: Re: title" to "Re^2: title", or "Re:2 title", or various similar things by convention* (certainly not uniformly applied, but still widely applied), until eventually someone said: screw it, we should just code it (and did). It wasn't retroactive, it was no big deal, but it was still cool. Anyway, I guess I see it as: does no harm does some good is easy to start doing it's an extensible path toward future (maybe better) stuff So why not? `------------ :Wq Not an editor command: Wq` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Solved? (aka "More On Thankfulness") by kaif (Friar) on Jun 28, 2005 at 04:14 UTC
I agree with most of the suggestions above. I personally would rather there not be a culture of editing titles by putting `[SOLVED]` in them (we all know how weird things get when the OP changes a node and later replies look out of context). If there is some sort of flag implemented, which I think is a good idea, then one of the states of the flag should be "this node is too old to have been flagged" and this clearly noted in the Search results and such.	[reply] [d/l]


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