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?
Thanks, Nathan! Appreciate you for bringing this up. 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.
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?
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.
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.
fixed is only used in BugUX and means a bug or UX bug was fixed.
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
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.
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)
and with UX being a halfway house between the two either can be used depending on the ‘flavour’ of the specific topic ↩︎
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.
Yup, I guess that is what I was angling at with the OP. @JammyDodger - we miss you and your dedication to keeping Meta going so smoothly! Personally, I hope they make you an offer you can’t refuse…
I’m returning to this Topic as I’ve recently been reprimanded for flagging a Topic in Feature which I believed should have been marked completed - but wasn’t.
What I’d like to have done was to simply tag it myself. However, as that tag is restricted to @staff, I couldn’t. Hey, as a TL4 I can do a bunch of potentially destructive things, but just not that. I can’t even edit tags at all in some Categories (i.e. Plugin).
So, how is one meant to flag little things this up to the moderators without annoying them and getting told off? Or is the plan to leave it a bit of a mess?
I think its okay to flag the topic as something else and say you think it should be marked completed/fixed, at least for “old” topics (as in: has been completed/fixed 6 months ago but topic hasn’t been updated).
(Eventho others disagree with that)
For acute things: it would be good practice for our staff to make sure they followup on things they fix.
I think that if we get flags to tag each completed feature from the last 13 years this forum has been active because people have OCD, it would be a big waste of time for everyone.
The tag itself is newish, never widely adopted, and we could simply close topics for completed features, allowing everyone to create new topics and quote old ones as necessary.
I’d rather remove the completed flag. It was applied 400 times and was only created as a way to help people write changelogs, who are dealt with differently nowadays.
I’m not sure I recognise this as the reason. It was initially implemented to provide a visual indicator that separated out completed feature requests from the rest of the closed topics. There’s a conversation somewhere on here between myself, Sam and Dave with more info in if you have a search. (I think it was in some whispers, but can’t recall exactly where)
Personally, I didn’t find it particularly onerous to keep on top of at the time. I did concentrate more on the ‘active’ window to ensure the topics towards the top of /latest were more consistent, though I also did others if they came across my path (related topics, and whatnot). Doing a full category audit of Feature would indeed be a much bigger job. (not to say it wouldn’t be useful to work through and prune/merge/close any ones that have been missed over the years, just saying that it would be time consuming and you’d need to weigh up where it sits on the priority list).
Is this a fear of what may be, or is this genuinely already happening? If it was an occasional one then I’m not sure that’s too much of an issue, but if it became a pattern then I agree that the flag system would not be the best place for it. I think a PM would be a less intrusive way of collecting the info.
But I also understand that you don’t really want devs and designers, etc to be sucked too deep into this as they will have other important work to do rather than tidying up meta.
Maybe stuff that requires a moderator, but is not urgent, could be reported via PMs to a separate group inbox. Then such tidy-up records would not flood the review queue, hiding topics where someone needs to act soon, but there would still be a place to collect those, so someone could take care of them if they have a few minutes.
This could work for all kinds of side notes, like a missing tag, a broken preview link in a theme component topic, or a feature topic that could be closed, so votes are returned to users.
Oh! I am just realizing the moderators group has nobody in it! Now I understand why a PM I wrote to @moderators a couple weeks ago never got a response..
I had created that as part of my idea to have a softer, gentler approach to moderation here. It’s important to have a single point of contact where you can reach a moderator and know you’re going to get a response. I hope the decision to remove that is reconsidered.
Also as part of trying to be kinder, gentler, I tried my best to avoid using “time wasting” as a reason for moderator decisions. I don’t think well intentioned community leaders who are trying to help keep discussions tidy should be made to feel bad about that.
Returning to the OP… I had a regular todo to review and clean up older topics, and it was a good manual task because there were often loose ends I was able to tie up along the way. Sometimes topics could just be deleted or they could be merged etc. But it is a gargantuan task and I only made it back a few years.
I’d be in favor of allowing trusted veterans like @nathank to add the tags rather than making them flag the topics for review by staff, especially right now when there is no community manager or devoted moderation team.
Edit: still have the links in my sidebar! This was to see topics that are open, unsolved, and over a week old. Still find these links helpful to see how well we are doing at getting topics resolved. Maybe more of us could help out with this if staff don’t have time to do it.
We’re in a bit of a transition period here when it comes to moderations, so some of the decisions we make in this very moment may not be durable, but here are my 2 cents on this particular subject:
I think we should aim to get to a place where:
Flags are used for more important things
We have a way to handle other things that are more trivial, or for general gardening
If we want to use completed, then we should empower a group of folks to handle that without using flags. Perhaps:
Grant TL3 and TL4 the power to tag things as such
Create a “gardening” topic where people can make suggestions for any kind of content gardening
I really appreciate that. Since you can only report a post once and never again, I was always reluctant to use flags for trivial problems, such as a preview link in a theme component topic that no longer works.
I suggested the inbox because I thought archiving handled requests might help keep track of what has already been resolved. This could be more difficult in a topic with lots of replies.
I am not sure how helpful it is to add the completed or fixed tag but not being able to close the topic. If someone else is still needed to close the topic, this doesn’t help much.
I read every post every day. Really. My last unseen post was in June 2024. As such, I have seen countless bug/ux reports being fixed or completed. Generally, I would just flag them to be closed. Less so do I see the need for the fixed or completed tags, but just a closing of the topic. IMO that alone signifies that thr topic has been resolved.
We definitely want to be doing more in this department.
close topic
I did concentrate more on the ‘active’ window to ensure the topics towards the top of /latest were more consistent, though I also did others if they came across my path (related topics, and whatnot). Doing a full category audit of 
