• Welcome to the Contour Enthusiasts Group, the best resource for the Ford Contour and Mercury Mystique.

    You can register to join the community.

posting solutions to problems

B

BAD SVT

Addicted CEG'er
Joined
Dec 19, 2005
Messages
6,521
Location
Formerly Las Vegas, now Dallas TX
i don't know if this has been covered before. if it has, forgive me. we have an excellent search engine here on CEG. but here's what itches... Ridiculously few of those who post their problems actually follow-up with posting what the solution to the problem was. MAJOR problem with that is by the time the thread is through, there've been a number of fellow cegers' thoughts posted; so much that readers looking to solve their own problem can't figure out where to begin. hence the many requests for answers to the seemingly same questions. take a look at the troubleshooting pages. you'll see what am talking about. any way we can solve this problem:shrug:?
 
Last edited:
Basing off the work tracking system I'm helping to code at work, what if we had some sort of open/resolved issue kind of thing attached to the threads. Like when a person solves their problem, they can set the status to resolved.
 
i have had a lot of problems trying to search the older threads...which is where most of the useful info is. i have seen things that i liked before i joined, went back to retrive it once i was ready and what do you know, it no longer exsits! Also i search for something..ie "heater" and it comes up with crap about some supercharged superfast car that looks really cool, and by the way the heater don't work...that didn't help me fix my heater at all, there has to be some way to preserve the old threads and weed out the unwanted crap when searching!
 
BAD SVT said:
that sounds good. long as people arent too lazy to do that either:rolleyes:.
Click to expand...

Yea I was thinking that. Plus that could create more work for mods, having to go through every troubleshooting post and check to see if they were resolved and never had the status updated.
 
xtascox said:
Yea I was thinking that. Plus that could create more work for mods, having to go through every troubleshooting post and check to see if they were resolved and never had the status updated.
Click to expand...

i think the solution lies with the original poster. plus, theres got to be a way for the mods to make people post the solutions to their issues. deducting post counts maybe:shrug:
 
BAD SVT said:
i think the solution lies with the original poster. plus, theres got to be a way for the mods to make people post the solutions to their issues. deducting post counts maybe:shrug:
Click to expand...

Something like that. How about this for an idea:

If a thread goes a certain amount of time without an update, the OP will be forced to update the thread and cannot go anywhere else until it is done.

I'm just thinking though, the amount of code to pull that off might be hell depending on how Vbulletin is put together. I only have first hand experience with phpBB and judging from the way it is set up, it would take quite a bit of effort to pull something like that off. It may be different with Vbulletin though.
 
xtascox said:
Something like that. How about this for an idea:

If a thread goes a certain amount of time without an update, the OP will be forced to update the thread and cannot go anywhere else until it is done.
Click to expand...

GENIUS! i like that one! looks like you do really know this stuff. how much do you think it would cost for a low budget website like ours to get that complicated?
 
i like that idea..or even simply delete unfinished threads after a set period of time...people would learn after a few got deleted!

one thing i was think'n that would be time consuming yet may be effective..that is for the search prob...go through and find/combine the best threads for info...repost and sticky the good complete ones(one per subject) and crap-can the rest on that subject. ie-"heater resistor pack How-To"- this is a 5min job that probly has 100+ threads...find or create a simple yet well explained thread and sticky it appropriatly...the other 99 get crapped.

i actually have the time and intrest to do this(most of my time here is at work anyway) but i would need a mod to help and cooperate with me to get it done...any takers? don't wanna waste my time if my work will be ignored!
 
BAD SVT said:
GENIUS! i like that one! looks like you do really know this stuff. how much would it cost for a low budget website like ours to get that complicated?
Click to expand...

It depends on who is writing the code, or if another third party piece of software was added. Most likely something like that would take a good overhaul of the current forum system (maybe not though). Basically a new permissions system would be created and when the post "expired," the OP's permissions would be reduced allowing them only to access that particular thread until it was updated. One may consider what if the OP has two threads and they both expire at the same time? The only way this could happen is if updates were calculated every time anyone posted to the thread. To eliminate this issue, the expiration time would have to be reset every time the OP updated the thread. Now there is still the rare case that someone could be logged on to two separate computers and have another person update another thread at the exact same time. I believe that MySQL already prevents simultaneous updates by allowing only one update query at a time, although this isn't apparent to a user since the updates are performed very fast. But if the threads are in separate tables then the issue could arise. So that would be one issue to take into account. Basically the OP would only have access to expired threads until all were updated to keep everything sane in the system.

On the cost issue, I believe that working from the current forum system, it would probably take approximately 20-30 hours total including coding, testing, and deployment to achieve this task. And that would be without running into issues. Although I could be wrong as I have never seen the source code for Vbulletin, it may be a simple 5 hour job. So the cost really comes down to the amount of hours spent on this.
 
Penalize members for not following up in one of their troubleshooting threads?
hell no! That's completely unfair.
How about just ask people nicely to follow up?

I agree that it would be really helpful if people did it more often, but I don't agree with penalizing them in case they forget to follow up.

I'm no Vbulletin expert, so I'm not sure on the specifics to making a sort of automated system either. Hell, we can't even get the software to automatically allow users access to the Classifieds after their 50 points yet!

The suggestion to link to a thread as a troubleshooting how-to resource is something that is already done on the site, so that's not so far fetched.
We do have some stickied threads that have helpful links in them, so it's easy enough to pm the person that maintains that thread and ask them to add a link to that stickied thread.
Revamping some of the how-to files is one of the items on the table for the new forum format that Mark (and others) are working on.
 
frenchblueC2 said:
Penalize members for not following up in one of their troubleshooting threads?
hell no! That's completely unfair.
How about just ask people nicely to follow up?
Click to expand...

i see your point. ideally, we should all followup on our posts. Here's the problem with that. Many post questions out of desperation. As soon as they figure out n solve it, they scurry off like chipmunks never to return, until another problem shows up again:mad:
 
BAD SVT said:
any suggestions? i'd just like to see troubleshooting threads ending with OP saying something like this..."thanx for all the advice. my problem turned out to be (***), and i solved it by replacing, fixing, or changing (***)". how hard is that:shrug:?
Click to expand...

Asking people to do it is one thing. Implementing the technology to force them to do it is way out of the question the more I think about it.
 
I just went through my threads and closed them all up. The ones with issues I stated what the answer was. It wasnt that hard, of course I didnt have that many but still it would help people in the future.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top