Create comment hierarchy for community answers

[Wunderkind]

The current community answers to questions suffers severely from bloat. It is not easy to separate comments from solutions from discussions and just plain 'me too' responses. Additionally, what often poses as an answer lacks detail with respondents seeming unwilling to chare actual solution detail.

I suggest that Esri establish a hierarchy of comments so that the community can 1. Offer a solution or 2. Make a comment that furthers the discussion or 3. Make an unconditional response (using an emoji for example for 'me too' responses etc). 

Also, offered solutions should be quite distinct in appearance from all the other type of comments so that the pages of response are not cluttered. 

[JesseCloutier]

Thanks for sharing this idea, @Wunderkind. Your point is taken that there's room to improve how conversations are formatted in Esri Community to make them easier to navigate. 

If I understand your request correctly, some of what you've requested is already part of the Esri Community experience. Though optional, it's highly encouraged that users who receive a satisfactory answer to their question mark them as an Accepted Solution. Doing so changes several aspects of the post's appearance and functionality to make it stand out from other questions which aren't marked the same way—including adding a green checkmark in the upper right-hand corner of the post preview in search results and adjusting search results to favor those with a confirmed solution. 

In the post itself, the solution is pinned to the top of the comments list and partially bordered with a green highlight. 

There's an available feature I want to point out in case you haven't come across it yet, which is that you can filter your searches to only turn up those with an Accepted Solution. Our Help Document How to search and apply filters has more details on that.

While there are some limitations currently in place around additional updates we'd be able to make to comment formatting, we are anticipating a major platform update later this year and will be exploring all aspects of how we can improve the Esri Community experience for all our users. I'm going to mark this idea as Closed, however, we will be keeping your thoughts in consideration as we have opportunities to improve the search and comment navigation experience.