This “official response” mode would meet exactly one of our use or discourse.
We have a closed medical community for our hospital, some posts are questions on how to deal with certain cases or situations. The correct answer should not be elected by the OP, but should be the result of extended discussion, and then an “official position” should be indicated by selected staff members.
Ideally we would like to be able to have some kind of “signature” : put at the end of the official response an indication of who endorsed this official response (as in most cases, the official response is not forged by one individual, but is the result of the converging positions of 3 or 4 key experts)…
I’d love to see this “official response” mode be implemented !
Yeah, I think “official reply” would be a natural progression for “add staff color”.
It shouldn’t be specific to Solved, since “official reply” is useful in virtually any context of a forum, and also with other plugins such as #plugin:voting
So how about:
Rename “add staff color” to “official reply”, as that is a much more meaningful name that helps admins intuit what to use it for
Give it better, less extreme styling; something akin to what a few game forums are doing with all staff posts:
Conceptually “staff colors” is actually different to my proposal here.
“staff color” can be applied to multiple posts, whereas there is only 1 “official response” to a topic, this allows us to float it up to the topic OP or topic list.
I completely agree that staff coloring has a hideous style, but am not sure these 2 features are the same thing.
“Cool down or I will shut down this topic” can happen multiple times in 1 topic and require emphasis, whereas, “Sorry, this is never going to happen, don’t bother asking us” would be a good example for a “official response”. Only one of those per topic, ever.
Just pick the most recent one. Being able to see all previous official responses in the timeline would still be very valuable.[quote=“sam, post:7, topic:59966”]
“Sorry, this is never going to happen, don’t bother asking us” would be a good example for a “official response”. Only one of those per topic, ever.
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What about when you want to say “Yes, this is planned” and later want to go “This is now done”? I think UserVoice works this way as well.
Create a new post, say “this is done”, mark it as the “official reply”, this automatically unmarks the previous official reply same as the way solved works.
I see where Sam is coming from here: Let’s say there is a topic where a question was asked. Someone responding with a solution, which was marked as correct. Future discussion occurs on the same question, and a mod has to come say “cool down”. That post would be later than the “solution”, and in @erlend_sh’s proposal would “overwrite” the actual solution. That doesn’t seem good.
I follow this, but can not think of a reason why you would ever want the “official status” of an entire topic to be “Cool, down everyone, I will be locking this topic if you keep arguing”, interestingly Falcor on BBS appears to have stopped using this style, I guess cause it is so horrible looking.
I just don’t agree with you @sam, I think “mark reply as staff response” is intensely relevant to everything you said in the OP. Plus we need to fix the style anyway.
The issue is that, this design is about having only 1 staff response per topic, ever.
The original design was to allow N highlighted staff responses.
I just don’t see how you merge these 2 things, they are 2 different features.
I guess if I had to vote on what to do here I would
Totally eliminate all staff highlighting code from core and associated columns (as a failed experiment) - someone can make a plugin for old feature if they must.
Implement “official reply” in the solved plugins per the OP here where there is only ever 1 “official reply”
This is somewhat tautological. They are two different features because you construct them that way. But there is no reason why a staff response or official reply should be limited to one and only one post. If, in any particular use case it should be only one, then admins will surely be wise enough to unmark previous replies when posting a new one.
And in cases where there are multiple staff responses but only one of them is an answer to the OP question, users will figure that out too.
I could go on with examples where multiple staff responses are not a problem, so why fix it if its not broken. Let’s remember that this is not StackExchange, which means that there can very well be several correct answers/responses to a question - or, perhaps more realistically: several replies together provide an exhaustive answer (and I would actually like to see that option in the solved plugin, but that is another discussion).
Of course there is, a very strong reason. “Official response” floats up to the OP, just the same as “Accepted Answer” floats up to the OP.
Sure, someone may want to “accept” multiple answers for a topic and we could design for that and allow 17 accepted answers per topic and 13 “official responses” but that is not what this feature is about. I am not interested in designing for the edge case where a “running log” of “staff official replies” gets collapsed upwards into the OP, this is not what this feature is about and will just end up being a big mess.
Yes, I see your point. But the question is: does the software need to take care of this by not allowing more than one official response or can admins handle that on a case by case basis?
Can the solved plugin not interact with “Add Staff Color” in its current form? If a category allows for staff responses and a post has staff color then that post is the official response.
The only remaining question is can multiple posts have staff color applied to them, and if so, which is the official response?
Side note: On two sites I’ve moderated we’ve had instances with multiple staff color posts in a single topic - not thrilled about losing the ability to do this.
