Create Tags to identify the kind of thread

Other Courses Talk
#1

Hello Boss @ben,

What do you think about creating Tags to help us browsing around and searching for topics?

Tags such as: HELP, SOLVED, DISCUSSION, SUGGESTION
They could be seen as a symbol at the side of the topic’s name, and they could be used instead of [HELP] and [SOLVED].

I was unsucessfully trying to search topics with [HELP] attached to them and I thought about it. Those tags could be used as filters in the search engine and it would also help us to understand while browsing around what each topic is about.

Don`t know, I like brainstorms, perhaps Tags could be a nice feature to this forum.

Best Regards,

Johnny Dalvi

#2

Hi Johnny, I was doing the very same the other evening also and I also got a few false positives, a slightly longer list of results than I would like - thanks for taking the time to do this and help the other students by the way - awesome! :slight_smile:

I think the tagging system on the forum is currently being used exclusively for the deep links between Udemy and the forum, where each lecture has a link to the appropriate topic here - Ben/Sam did this a few months back in order to better support users on Udemy since the Discussion / Q&A area was changed.

I’d previously thought about using tags for things also, and your idea is a good one, but in doing so now I think it would end up confusing the tagging structure for the Udemy links/courses, I may be wrong, I’m sure Ben can provide a better response - some of the above was from my, failing, memory :slight_smile:

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#3

I like the possibility of linking the forum to the courses, this is very important.

Perhaps this could be used as flags or something alike, at least for [HELP] and [SOLVED] topics, this could help browsing around and it would eventually help those that still have some error and issues to be taken care of, I’m sure that there are plenty of unsolved matters that got lost in the forum.

Perhaps another kind of system instead of flag/tag to help us find who still need to solve a problem. Some ideas from other users would be very welcomed too!

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#4

Just to let you know you can now mark any reply (post) as a solution to the topic (thread), from the spanner. That means the [SOLVED] isn’t needed, as the tick both marks the topic in the list AND makes it clear which answer is the best… like Udemy’s Q&A.

With regards to using [HELP] this is helpful as it draws our eye, but not required.

Using an actual tag is possible, but does complicate things when we already use tags for lecture linking. I think that if and when we host this site ourselves, we may modify it to explicitly ask you when you post if this is a question that needs answering, as discussed with @sampattuzzi.

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#5

This is awesome! Thank you Ben

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#6

Sorry, just updated that post

#7

I spotted this on one of the posts I marked as solved with a tick - however, the only downside is that this doesn’t get represented on the summary of topics on the home page of the forum - where-as [Solved] currently does stand out.

Another minor inconvenience is that you cannot order the topics by solution being ticked, you can with # replies, # views etc, if we could sort by solution it would mean it would be really easy to get all the non-responded to items at the top of the list. Whilst this is only a minor headache on the forums at present, having just read the announcement you made on Udemy, you guys are going to be doing a lot of scrolling up and down I think! :wink:

That would be good, but again would maybe need some form of ordering to help you spot them?

It might be nice for community members to see, more obviously, their contributions when they are the ones providing solutions also, badges would be ok, but very manual to assign and they tend to get a bit hidden, something under the profile link on the left of peoples posts might be handy. Community members may well feel a sense of reward through helping others and being recognised for it, as this grows it may help reduce the amount of Q&A your team then need to respond to.

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#8

I agree with @Rob. if you add the option to be asked if the post is a question or not as you discussed with Sam, perhaps you could make it filterable.
The idea of keeping the record of how many posts were pointed as solutions from each member is also a nice feature to have, a kind of feedback and sense of progression to whom is trying to help.

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#9

It may also lead to answers being accepted by students more quickly as they will perhaps believe the answer more easily if the person responding has a good standing with regards to the answers marked as solution.

Not entirely sure what is possible within the scope of the forum as it is, but they are some ideas which may be good to have in the future :slight_smile:

Experts Exchange has changed considerably since I was there last, but this was kinda what I was thinking of…

The level is quite nice actually in the GameDev.tv context also - puts the onus on the person asking the question to accept specific solution…

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#10

Nice system!
It is a kind of gamification of the forum, which fits pretty well here actually :joy:

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#11

You have to be careful when typing in the domain name though :slight_smile:

#12

Sorry, what do you mean?
My English limitations blocked my understanding right now :confounded:

#13

Experts-exchange to expert-sexchange

There was a big thing about it ages ago, I think they added the hyphen as originally the domain name was all one word :slight_smile:

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#14

:joy::joy:
it is a dangerous name indeed

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#15

One thing I’ve spotted with this functionality is that it works exactly as you stated here, which I clearly didn’t read properly. We do have scenarios across the forums where a user will post a problem, then resolve it themselves. The post is still worth keeping because it may help another student/member, but because they didn’t reply to their own post, or, in some cases they did - but the reply wasn’t the answer because they also updated the main post of the topic, there is no way to indicate the main post of a topic is “solved” using the tick system.

I do appreciate this is by all accounts default behaviour for the Discourse software but thought it may be worth mentioning. I may post on it on the Discourse site and see what the feeling about it is - it’s probably already been covered somewhere I expect - just seems like something that would be useful - to us at least.

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#16

We have re-purposed tags as Lectures, and hence are keeping them for this purpose only.

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#17
#18

I had posted about this problem on the Discourse site, I’m not entirely certain of the out come of that, as the conversation lead into notifications and some other things. There was a fix applied 19 hours ago but it wasn’t in relation to the above issue. The suggested workflow is that a user post a reply to themselves and mark that as the solution. I am uncertain of how I would spread the word to the thousands of members of the forum to do that, so I’ve just followed the post up with a query to see if there is any alternative.

#19

This was the item which the bug fix I mentioned above was for.

#20

Just heard back from Sam on Discourse and he states that he would prefer to not make this change. Thus, the suggestion is to use the original poster replies to their own post and then that is marked as the solution.

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