Thread

It’s easy enough to ignore stupid posts. No one forces you to read or respond to them, and doing so only bumps them up.

Except for those of us who read new posts through a newsreader such as Google Reader…

You’re assuming I don’t use Google Reader, D13? I do, and nothing about it forces me to read or reply to junk. I vote for a little extra patience.

Okay, fair enough… my mistaken assumption.  Personally it’s frustrating to me when half of the new posts are crap.  I *am* forced to read them—how else am I to determine if they’re worthwhile?

Just a little concept:

Let’s say we make a FAQ: questions that keep coming back, and keep bugging (as in “why don’t they RTFM?”) more experienced CI contributors. In each question and answer a couple of keywords are determined.

Suppose when a new user (with e.g. less than 10 posts) starts typing a new topic. After he has written a few lines, a little javascript-popup (not the annoying alert kind, but a nice mootools or jquery one) appears a bit next to the textarea that says: “Why wait for an answer? Maybe one of these questions is the same as yours!”, with a list of appropriate FAQs that were brought up by an AJAX request, searching the FAQs for those keywords?

Even interesting or insightful forum posts could be labeled a ‘FAQ’ so that those would be searched through as well.

+
Userfriendly way of bringing the FAQs under the new user’s attention > he may find his answer quicker, maybe take on a search-it-yourself-attitude and the more interesting questions will still be posted.
+
It could also search the manual, bringing that one under the attention as well.
What other framework has something like this? Could be cool 😊

-
I guess this requires quite a bit of work from CI developers, while they should be working on getting their new products out 😊 (although I’d forgive them for not being very productive today :p)
-
damn, I should be studying rather than typing ideas here 😕

Just a little concept:

Let’s say we make a FAQ: questions that keep coming back, and keep bugging (as in “why don’t they RTFM?”) more experienced CI contributors. In each question and answer a couple of keywords are determined.

Suppose when a new user (with e.g. less than 10 posts) starts typing a new topic. After he has written a few lines, a little javascript-popup (not the annoying alert kind, but a nice mootools or jquery one) appears a bit next to the textarea that says: “Why wait for an answer? Maybe one of these questions is the same as yours!”, with a list of appropriate FAQs that were brought up by an AJAX request, searching the FAQs for those keywords?

Even interesting or insightful forum posts could be labeled a ‘FAQ’ so that those would be searched through as well.

+
Userfriendly way of bringing the FAQs under the new user’s attention > he may find his answer quicker, maybe take on a search-it-yourself-attitude and the more interesting questions will still be posted.
+
It could also search the manual, bringing that one under the attention as well.
What other framework has something like this? Could be cool 😊

-
I guess this requires quite a bit of work from CI developers, while they should be working on getting their new products out 😊 (although I’d forgive them for not being very productive today :p)
-
damn, I should be studying rather than typing ideas here 😕

Very good idea, but im guessing it will take a little bit of js to detect the change then process it via Ajax then return the results.

I roll my eyes almost every time i read things that are asked and answered many times before but why those questions keep on coming back?

people who come here for quick fixes will always find a way to get their quick fixes otherwise they wouldn’t bother asking for them.

I think the best way to keep the annoyance to a minimum is to ignore the stupid posts. In your forum control panel you can ingore posts from certain people maybe there should be an option to see the ignored people by other members and the reason why they are ignored.

I agree with xwero, just ignore and don’t let it get to you => better to code a couple of lines than waste your energy..

I quite like Sarre’s idea. I’ve seen this implemented in the warez-bb forum too: when the topic title gets defocussed, it runs an ajax search query to see if other threads allready exist.

I really think this could work. With a bit of jQuery it should be no problem at all!

@Developer13 => yup reading feeds can sometimes lead to the “blind leading the blind.” (no disrespect to Google Reader).  It would be better to read a programming book (or whatever topic) and gain some deeper knowledge…

I don’t think any additions will be made to the forums since EE 2.0 is in development. Possibly after EE 2.0 is released we could see some changes.

I spend more time searching past posts for that nugget of knowledge that will help me proceed.  So a more refined search process would help although what we have now is quite good and I usually find what I need after a bit of digging.

A lot of posts are annoying and a FAQ would certainly help newbies a lot.

The manual is excellent but to be fair you have to read it over and over again to really grok the whole thing.  I think this is true of any technical reference.

I think the best approach is to ignore the annoying stuff, I have uncovered posts by brilliant people who added to the community on the very first post (I think we have all seen these) so for this very reason I think limiting the posting process will work in our detriment.

You can usually tell who is going to do some work themselves and who is just here to take.

That’s my two cents.
doodle

I’ve done work with ExpressionEngine’s Forums Module, and I could make the additions needed.

Just because EllisLabs are busy - it’s incoherant.

I am totally for this or maybe 5 - Have I reached that limit yet?

media temple does the same kind of thing with their ticket system you start typing what your ticket is about and the KB and FAQ come up with related articles while you type. prob a good addon when EE2 comes out based on CI…. that way we can contribute that to the community 😊

media temple does the same kind of thing with their ticket system you start typing what your ticket is about and the KB and FAQ come up with related articles while you type. prob a good addon when EE2 comes out based on CI…. that way we can contribute that to the community 😊

yeah this feature at mediatemple is pretty useful and i imagine it cuts down on their support requests significantly

on the topic of having a minimum post count, i think this is just going to lead to people hijacking other threads, this is almost worse because people will be more likely to just post their junk in threads with more discussion going on.  doesn’t seem like a very viable solution.  additionally, in my case, i usually think a bit and am trepid in posting here, i’ve been reading / posting here for almost a year and still have less than 40 posts.  so under the proposed rules, even if it were set to five posts, i would have had to wait a month or so before it was “ok” for me to post my own thread, which would just be plain annoying. as a matter of fact, if things were set up this way it’s very possible i wouldn’t have ever taken the time to make those five posts, it adds a degree of exclusivity, however slight it might be, and it just doesn’t feel right for the general attitude here, or with any open source project.