Hey @mcwumbly!
I think it’s every community managers ideal that the OP of a topic will be the one to mark the solution - as they inherently have the most context about their discussion and what solves it.
That said, the reality is that’s not the case, and it’s largely fallen on the shoulders of Admins. (We had some resource changes within our team which limited our ability to dedicate more time towards making this part of the community culture - although it’s something we’re beginning to pick back up as more resources have become available for our team).
Interestingly, my ideas towards approaching this have shifted, especially since creating this discussion, AI has become much more prevalent. The emergence of standards like MCP also bring foundations for creative solutions.
At the moment, a significant number of approaches to this challenge rely on contextually unaware approaches (e.g. the little banner “Topic solved?”)
I imagine a world where AI can assist both OP and Admins in marking solutions.
For example, combining an Agent and MCP that has knowledge of documentation, potential workflows could be:
- After 7 days of inactivity within a topic, the agent reads the topic, uses the MCP and identifies replies that could be the solution. If it finds a reply, it uses that to DM the OP to say, “I found a reply in a topic you created that seems to solve it - is this accurate? Would you like to mark it as the solution?”
- Similar to the above, providing Admins a dashboard/report/table of topics that the Agent understands to have a solution for Admins to review and mark as solved - with reasoning for why they think it’s solved
- We also see people indicate that something is the solution - “That’s great, and solved what I was looking for” - this is a strong signal for AI to detect this and provide some form of indicator that a solution has been provided.