Would it be possible to have a whole topic dedicated to users answering questions?
As a example say we are a car group and wish to work out issues as a community.
The original post would have questions such as:
What do you believe the issue is?:
Why do you believe you have this issue?
Engine temps:
Oil level:
And so on
Without each user having to copy and paste the questions into the comment field and then answer them and without the comments section becoming a mess.
Also is it possible to collapse replies to a comment as to group them together, rather than confusion as to who is replying to who, when it comes to helping with the issue.
The way here, is each user posting their question in a different topic. There is no reason for everything to happen in a single topic.
Check our support category. It’s the same thing, but since each problem has its own topic, there is no confusion around replies not applying to the topic.
So say we set up a new category named Diagnosis, and each user posted their individual issues as a new topic, would it be possible to have a set of very specific questions pop up for them to answer before their topic is posted?
The community that I am part of has a lot of repeated questions, answering a questionnaire first would make it a lot more helpful as a community to solve the problem, answering questions that many would not have though of but are vital as to working out the issue.
You are not alone, but this is a very complicated thing. People seeking support are not the ones who will read rules, fill questionnaires properly, etc.
You can add a topic template to your support category, but some (or most) users will just ignore it.
If you must have structured questionnaires and can’t live without it, you may want to use a different software as Discourse is geared towards free form text.
The LetsEncrypt Community has a Help category that when you create a new topic, you are shown a template with a very short explanation and a list of questions to answer. Maybe this is what you are looking for? Something that will be presented to everyone every time they start to post a new topic in that category seems to be a good way to get required information out of the user so questions can be answered without a lot of guess work. To be clear, not everyone answers the questions, and they are told right off that if they want help, answer the questions. Nearly everyone complies. You can list your own questions for your users to answer while still having their own specific question as the topic heading. Search words will bring up relevant topics as it does in any Discourse instance. (LetsEncrypt is using Discourse by the way.)
Here’s their template (blank lines omitted for short length here):
Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. crt.sh | example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.
My domain is:
I ran this command:
It produced this output:
My web server is (include version):
The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):
My hosting provider, if applicable, is:
I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don’t know):
I’m using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel):
The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you’re using Certbot):
You can list your own questions for your users to answer while still having their own specific question as the topic heading. Search words will bring up relevant topics as it does in any Discourse instance. (LetsEncrypt is using Discourse by the way.)