How hard would it be to build a 'trouble ticket' system for one of these boards? A poster can ask a question and optionally generate a 'ticket' with a state 'resolved/abandoned/unresolved' which can be changed by that user or admin only. That way there could be a scoreboard that would track how many issues linuxquestions.org has resolved. This would ecourage people with questions to let other users know that the reccommendations were useful, raised other issues, or completely hazardous. Users can also sort threads by status.

At this other board I sometimes try to solve questions at the ppl who ask questions pay points to the one they find gave them the best suited answer, and I was thinking a while ago being able to close off a question & awarding some sort of "score" a good thing. Guess Im slow with writing stuff like that down :-]
Like u already said, there can be really hazardous stuff or even non-answers of half answers (whats worse).

Ure idea gets my vote!

Since the system would work smoother if 'askers' would terminate the ticket, it might be better to score the 'asker' since their co-operation is needed. (Open or tickets would keep showing up if the list is sorted by date&state, where they would need to be marked 'abandoned' by an admin after a preset period)

Scorekeeping for 'answerers' seems to be a bit of ego-massaging, but I guess it wouldn't hurt.

I gues what I'm getting at is that a question has value, answers more value, and results (positive or negative) have more value still) when the threads become archived.

I think it would make the site an even more valuable tool.



[Edited by mcleodnine on 06-07-2001 at 08:53 PM]

Yeah, maybe that wouldnt work so good here. I agree its the value of the answer itself that does it, not getting into the top 10 :-]

Who can determine what value a question has? I mean for each user their question is the most urgent & impossible ever.
Rating answers will be even harder cuz a "good" answer is not always a "best practice" answer, or even a complete one, and there are answers that cant be "best practice" cuz someone has got to force stuff or is told to RFM for the next 3 dys :-].
If it gets solved somehow I hope as a result some answers get less terse/cryptic, and less OS specific (where applicable). Thatll add to the value of this site for sure.

*Btw, Ill benefit from having a ticketing system as well, I find it hard to keep track of still standing issues...

The next version of the forum will allow you to rate a THREAD, but not a specific person. I toyed with a karma system similar to slashdot, but scraped it for many reasons (look at all the problems they have). I do like the idea of the question asker being able to mark a thread as answered. I do not know if this will make it into the next upgrade, but it is a definite TODO. Thanks for the feedback.

I wasn't referring to assigning an empircal number (value) to a question/answer, but just thinking that if a person was browsing the archives, a Q/A session that was resolved would be more useful than one left hanging. The value I was talking about was purely subjective (less/more).

As far as rating users, that was a bad idea, I was just after some idea to encourage thread starters ('askers') to close the ticket so that unresolved issues could be easier to browse. I dunno, it does appear to be a tall order.



[Edited by mcleodnine on 06-08-2001 at 11:49 AM]

If you want a site that gives points to questions and answers there is always Experts Exchange Some of the things that I don't like about them are that they put a limit on the amount of points you have, therefore limit that amount of questions you can ask.

I like the idea of being able to 'close' a question off. I have asked several questions and useful answers have been given. I always reply stateing that was the answer I but what about something that[list=1][*]Allows you to 'close' a question when an answer has been given.[*]Automatically reminds the poster that the question is still open after a specified period.[*]Automatically closes the thread after a specified period of time.[*]Automatically places the post that is the answer just underneath the question. Although that may not work because the answer maybe bits from several posts.[/list=1]That would make the archive more useful becuase someone searching could tell if the answer given was helpful or not. It would also make it so that if the poster finds an answer somewhere else (man pages, web site, Experts Exchange etc) they are reminded and can post the answer to close it.

Everytime I see that I laugh out loud.

www.expertsexchange.com
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If you missed it, it can also be read as www.ExpertSexChange.com

I'll probably still be laffin when I roll outta bed in the morning. Maybe when I get over it I can actually finish reading the post.