Inconsistent marking of Topics as ☑️ Solved, Completed, or Fixed here on meta.discourse.org

Site feedback
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Hi wonderful Discourse staff who run and lovingly maintain this awesome online forum with their own product.

I note that we have the Solved Plugin active for Support. Great to see this awesome dogfooding in practice! Ditto for the use of the fixed and completed tags.

Unfortunately, there are a tonne of Topics in Support, Bug, Feature, and UX that haven’t been marked with these. This is quite confusing for the users of this forum, and hampers effective searches for existing solutions. Basically, if these aren’t going to be used consistently, they probably shouldn’t be used at all.

May I request that this is prioritised going forwards and someone (?intern, ??AI) is tasked with correctly marking the old ones?

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Thanks, Nathan! Appreciate you for bringing this up. :sunflower: We definitely want to be doing more in this department.

Looks like enabling solutions for the Support category has worked pretty well for that category. The fixed and completed tags are also quite helpful, which can be used in all categories.

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I don’t see the completed tag in Marketplace.

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I believe that these are staff only.

Perhaps it would be helpful to expand this to trust_level_3? This might also help with Marketplace as per Jay’s point above.

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FWIW For Marketplace there’s delivered, which is not restricted to team.

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Thanks for sharing that context, James! :hugs:

So to sum up, it appears that at the moment we have five ways to indicate when a topic has taken its course and needs to be wrapped up. Does this about capture it?

what where who
:check_box_with_check: Discourse Solved Support Installation Dev Data & reporting SSO topic owner, @team, TL4
fixed Bug UX (works everywhere) @team
completed Feature UX @team
delivered Marketplace all members
:locked: close topic everywhere @team and automatic

This does feel to me like an awful lot of variety. I don’t know why the tags are different. Maybe it is helpful/informative for folks to be able to scroll through those tag lists individually. These tags and their purpose are not so discoverable, however.

:check_box_with_check: solved is easily discoverable and works quite well for support. I think it makes sense to limit it to that category. It’s helful to be able to filter for solved/unsolved topics in that category - I often forget about that pulldown though and wishit were more discoverable in the UI. :blush:

fixed is only used in Bug UX and means a bug or UX bug was fixed.

completed is used in Support Feature UX as well. UX because UX topics are often also feature requests. There was one topic, "Reader Mode" theme component feedback, that was in Site feedback but I’ve now moved it to Theme component where it seems to belong now that the component has been released.

delivered is only used in Marketplace.

Topics are :locked: closed for a variety of different reasons:

  • Support topics are closed a month after the last reply, once solved
  • Marketplace topics are closed a month after the last reply, whether or not they are delivered.
  • moderators close topics
    • when they are resolved
    • to prevent replies (eg documentation or release-notes)
    • as moderation tactic to end discussion in topics that have become unproductive or have run their course

Some potential next steps:

  • add descriptions to fixed completed delivered tags that explain how we use them
  • create a data explorer query with results like the table above, but listing the real and up to date number of topics that are solved/ unsolved, fixed/not fixed, completed/not completed, delivered/not delivered
  • create a data explorer query that lists the topics that have been closed, fixed, completed, delivered in a given timeframe
  • create a topic here in Site feedback to share the results of the above queries each week using an automation
  • create a topic here with a little howto guide for wrapping up topics and get a team together to follow it to start working through the list, in reverse chronological order
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I added descriptions as below, to appear when you mouse over the tag or go to the tag page. Let me know if you have suggestions. Torn between keeping it short and sweet, and providing more detailed context. The categories themselves also have descriptions which are more detailed.

fixed

We prioritize the fixing of bugs in our software reported in the Bug and UX categories. Once bugs are fixed, they are given this tag.

completed

When features suggested in the Feature and UX categories are implemented, they are given this tag.

delivered

When a topic in Marketplace is confirmed delivered by the provider or recipient, it is given this tag.

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Gosh. You made that sound complicated. :slight_smile:

Ostensibly, you pop the fixed tag on bugs that have been fixed and completed on feature requests that have been implemented. [1] It’s part of the process to close the topics out (and keep interested parties updated with the relevant info). They were initially implemented to provide some visual indication that ‘a good thing had happened’ versus the lock symbol of a closed topic. When these tags are consistently applied you get a nice wave of green when you scroll down their category topic lists.

(And delivered was a separate but similar one that wasn’t team—controlled so it could be used in Marketplace)

For Solved, there are quite a few categories where it’s active rather than just the generic Support category. Pretty much any category where the majority of topics are going to be questions that can get a solution. Support, Installation, Dev, Data & reporting, SSO

Ideally, the best practice is to have the OP mark the solution but we know that this sometimes doesn’t happen (for a variety of reasons) so I would often scroll the topic lists back and clean some outstanding ones up after a couple of weeks or so (once they were deemed to be ‘abandoned’)

FWIW The Theme component topic for that is Reader Mode, so really that feedback topic you linked shouldn’t be in Theme component (as it’s not a theme component topic). It should probably be in Feature or UX as I think that’s where these have come to live now more of them exist.

(I think it was in Site feedback as it was an experiment here on meta)

  1. and with UX being a halfway house between the two either can be used depending on the ‘flavour’ of the specific topic ↩︎

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Awesome! Thanks for filling in some gaps there. I updated my table above.

That hasn’t been done systematically since you left, which is why we now have this topic to talk about getting caught up and having a system in place so we don’t fall behind again.

Good call! I moved it to Feature.

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