resolved threads

ksandom

I've been using this service as a registered user for just under 2 months now. Something I've noticed is the huge number of threads which are resolved but have not been tagged resolved. I've also notive a number of users which have instructions for marking a thread resolved and instructing users to mark it resolved when it is. Thus I beleive I'm not the only one who would like to see something done about this.

So many a time sitting on the toilet was spent trying to figure out how to solve this issue. Things that I came up with:

When I've marked a thread resolved, it has only ever worked on the second attempt. I'm not sure if this is a bug, or simply a lag between when the action occured to when it is displayed.

A way around it I thought would work quite well is to have a color coded cell beside each post. The cell doesn't need to be big, it just needs to be big enough for users to recognise the colour. This could be implemented in a number of ways, but the way I was thinking of would be to use shades of colors to represent things like:
- time lapsed since last post - This one would be the most helpful one
- Time lapsed since first post
- Average posts per day

Probably the best way to represent these is to have them in separate cells with individual colors.
I know this information is either available or able to be derived from the information available on the posts, however it's not easy to see quickly. I think a color coded system like this would allow users to see quickly and easily which posts are worth looking at when giving aid.

Thanks 🙂

stolzyboy

as this may/may not be a good idea, it will likely not happen, jstarkey doesn't like hacking the vBulletin much more than he has to, and from what i've seen of the code, it is kinda messy in some respects, and a pain to work through

also, when are you having problems using the mark resolved links, jstarkey was fixing some of these like the last week or two as i was noticing that it didn't work in all spots, like would work if you just read the post and click it, but if you just posted, you wouldn't be able to click it, if you click the anchor(go to last post on thread), it wouldn't work, etc... but those problems have all been fixed, as far as i can tell when i use it

and regardless what we do, we will never be able to "force" someone to use the link, and just because the thread is old doesn't mean it is resolved

all us mods have been trying to keep up with the threads, if we believe beyond a doubt that the thread is resolved, we can mark it so, but only the thread starter or a mod can do so

ksandom

That's cool. I can see your point. But in it's defence for a moment:

I was meaning it as an indicator rather than an ablsolute "this thread is resolved". As you identified, it would not be acurate enough to be absolute. Another thing that could be added to make it more acurate, one of the timers could be reset by the thread starter to show that they are still interested in what people have to say. This would show that although there has been no activity, thee is still someone listening. This could also work well with general users being able to reset a timer to indicate that they are interested in what's going on.

Anyhoo, it's just an idea and if the code is getting too complex to start adding things such as this to it (as projects often do), I completly understand. Although it might be worth thinking about for future versions.

Merve

I know what you mean...especially in the Newbies forum. Maybe when they sign up there should be a big marquee saying: 'Read the FAQ or face the consequences of getting hit by the LART!'

It's really frustrating when I'm going through the newbies section or the coding section. It really sort of bugs me...