Hello, I’ve been a community manager for many years, and throughout this time, I’ve consistently faced a challenge across various platforms—such as Khoros for Autodesk forums—regarding how to mark topics or the first post in a topic as questions that require an answer and, potentially, a solution.
Let me explain: When people participate in forums, they start topics for different reasons. Sometimes, it’s to share information, in which case no answer or solution is needed. Other times, it’s to ask a question, which is especially common in technical support forums. By default, we assume these questions require an answer and a solution, but this isn’t always the case. Some questions are open-ended and only need comments or acknowledgment, not necessarily a solution. However, many questions are specific and do require an answer and one or more solutions.
I know Discourse has a ‘solutions’ plugin, which I use regularly, and it’s helpful. But I’m stuck on one issue: How can I create a list of questions that haven’t received an answer or a solution—or at least haven’t received a solution—since not all topics are questions and don’t require an answer or solution?
So, my question is: Is there currently a mechanism in Discourse that allows marking a topic as requiring at least an answer and, if applicable, a solution? This would help generate a list of unanswered or unsolved questions, encouraging forum participants to provide solutions.
If the solutions plugin isn’t a solution then you could create a set of tags to track the status of the issue. I don’t have a good suggestion for what they are, but maybe something like
unanswered
open
discussed
satisfied
unsolvable
And topics would start as unanswered and when there were some responses the user or a moderator could change the tag (you might be able to do something more clever with the automations plugin?). Then you could search for the unanswered ones, for example.
Well yes, I thought about tags but that requires manual intervention at least when the topic is created to mark it as a question that requires at least an answer and a solution, the OP should know the procedure and apply a tag accordingly. With my experience of users asking technical questions very often in a hurry and under the stress of having to deal with their issue in their workplace, I am pretty sure they would not follow the procedure, that would in any case have to be indicated clearly.
I was more thinking (dreaming…) of a check box below the editor like:
This is a question that requires an answer and a solution
Or something like that.
>[!note]
This problem has been discussed among CM on main platforms like Khoros…
Well, you could require that topics in the category include a tag. It’s an extra click (or three?), though. Again, I think the automation plugin might help.
A plugin that assigns a tag depending on the category is pretty simple, and someone may have made one.
I have been using Filter for this here on meta. (Not sure why the filter link disappeared from the first section of the sidebar recently - have been looking into that!)
I put the following filter links in a custom section in the sidebar.
This allows me to quickly get to a list of topics that haven’t had any activity for over a week and have not yet been resolved. When I have time during the day I chip away at that list by answering what I can and assigning to colleagues what I can’t.
What I am still lacking is the ability to easily indicate which topics are unresolved, I don’t know the answer myself and I am not sure who I can loop in. I have started a list of people I can reach out to in these cases but it’s still a work in progress.
Tags are an obvious solution to reach for but they also create alot of structure that can be hard to maintain, because you are having to manually change them as topics change unless you have created some automation. It may not be worth all that effort to keep the tags up to date.
Thanks guys for the ideas and suggestions. I think the core of what I am looking for is more a way to mark a topic (not in specific categories, can be anywhere) as a question that requires at least a solution. This mark would allow the production of a list of questions that have no solution (possibly filtered by dates but that we already can do). And this would not require admin/mod intervention and no regular check.
I understand tags could be used but they dont have the simplicity of a check box.
Sam created a prototype for an automation that lets you put a button on a topic to automatically tag and take action on a topic (eg set timer to auto close) but that is still a prototype and not shareable.
in their workplace, I am pretty sure they would not follow the procedure, that would in any case have to be indicated clearly.