How to mark topic as "solved" without adding a reply

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

Fair enough. I seldom directly tag people. The reason I did here is A: this is a core plugin, B: Sam was the person who responded to one of these original requests saying there were no plans for it and he seems to be one of the people strongly opposed to/concerned about this request, and well, C: my topics have not gotten answers several times (oddly in one case Sam liked it but didn’t respond):

Option to use "Docs view" when accessing Docs category from anywhere in Discourse

Currently when using the Discourse-docs: Documentation Management Plugin, when you access it from the Docs link in the hamburger menu (or enable the link in the Top Menu), you get a nice, customized view with filters, etc. It looks like this: [image] However, if you access the “docs” category/categories from the Category List, you get a normal forum view (i.e. list of topics, topic participants, etc.). If you really want to use Discourse for “docs” this is non-ideal. This is what it looks lik…

I missed the Composer formatting shortcuts because they're not in the keyboard reference

This is a little embarrassing, but my recent topic In-line topic search-and-linking, e.g. Roam-like bracket links was partly (though not entirely) inspired by the fact that I didn’t think there was a keyboard shortcut for Linking in the composer. This was my impression because when I consulted the built-in Keyboard Shortcut reference (a very handy thing!) I did not see a shortcut for linking. What I didn’t notice at the time was that other common shortcuts like Ctrl-B are also not in there, whi…

I’m not a paying customer, so I get that my topics may be less prioritized, however in the case of the keyboard formatting shortcuts, that seems like a pretty universally important thing to get right (and it’s very hard to measure how many other people miss it). And as I say Sam Liked that topic, yet didn’t respond.

@codinghorror

No plans for this and it is not on any of our roadmaps. I don’t understand how a topic can be solved with no replies… with no replies, you only have the problem statement, no solutions.

Thanks for responding so quickly! It really depends on how you use “Solved”. In this particular case this company wants to use it in part to handle Feature Requests and Bug Reports. There are, of course, multiple other ways one could do this, but all have drawbacks.

• Move requests and issue reports to a subcategory when resolved. However we have issues reappear often enough, or people wanting to comment further on those requests, and then we’d need to move it back. And of course this loses the possibility for people to mark their own topics as resolved, though that’s probably minor in this context.
• Close the “solved” topics and leave them in-place. The main issue here is that AFAIK there is no easy, in-line filter for “closed” like there is for “solved” (included as part of the plugin). Maybe there’s a theme component or something, I haven’t looked yet as I’m hoping to not have to change the workflow. And as with the first option, there is no way for people to reply again later. I recognize this may be a philosophical difference, i.e. I suspect your approach to this would just be “Then they can open a new topic”, but that is definitely an opinionated stance, and one it seems unreasonable to expect everyone to agree with (partly because I already don’t agree with it ).
• Use a “solved” tag instead of the plugin. The problem with this is again there is no easy way to filter a normal topic list for this AFAIK. You can of course use an advanced search, and maybe link to that in the header menu or something. But it’s needlessly cumbersome. The Solved plugin also has the nice option to show a checked/unckecked box in topic lists, which the Closed approach essentially replaces with a similarly effective lock icon, but scanning for tags is much less quick since they can occur anywhere in the tag list.

The bottom line is that this use case seems like a pretty natural fit for the plugin’s capabilities, with the exception of this one issue. In numerous other ways the plugin is great, and provides benefits over all other options I am so far aware of (I am certainly open to options I hadn’t considered though). And it’s not the only use case either, as Tobias Eigen himself points out in one of the threads I linked to in my original reply above.

The company I’m working with also uses the plugin for a more Support/Q&A-type category where the lack of “solved by topic starter” is less of a problem and is, in fact, quite useful in its originally intended way of highlighting the reply that is the solution even when it is far down in a discussion. So alternative solutions would end up being used in parallel with the plugin and it would be nice to just be able to use the one system.

At any rate I have understood from the beginning that there is resistance to implementing this. I still don’t really understand why though, unless it’s just a sort of “not worth spending the time if there is no good use case”. If that’s the situation hopefully I and Tobias have provided some reasonable examples to support its implementation.