mark question as answered and easy - hard

[Anonymous User]

Original User: alnesbit

Hi all,

So, I miss being able to quickly see which questions have been answered and which posting the answer is in. Can we do that again somehow? please?

I also liked seeing which questions were easy, medium or hard. How about that?

Thanks,

[JimBarry]

Hi all,

So, I miss being able to quickly see which questions have been answered and which posting the answer is in. Can we do that again somehow? please?

I also liked seeing which questions were easy, medium or hard. How about that?

Thanks,

We don't have that yet, but we're working on it, almost there, and we agree with you that we need it up and working asap.

[KatharinaDubach]

I've no idea if this would be feasable or not, but recently I've experienced several times that someone posts a question in the German Forum and the exact same question - in English, obviously - in one of the English fori. I think it would be helpful to have a link between these two, so anyone considering posting on one thread can quickly check if there is such a "sister thread" and if maybe the question has already been answered. At least the poster should have the ability to mark a question as answered or no longer relevant (even if there was no answer to it).

[Anonymous User]

Original User: whuber

I also liked seeing which questions were easy, medium or hard. How about that?

I liked that too but after a few years realized that easy or hard were in the eyes of the beholder.  By the end (of the old forums) the rational thing was for people with questions to mark them all as hard because that offered a better incentive for people to answer them.  I also noticed that FAQs and newbie questions tended to be marked hard while questions from veterans were often marked as easy, perhaps because experienced people have a sense that most questions are easy to someone.  People who were posing programming related questions almost always marked them as hard, no matter what.

Thus, the marking of the questions had little or nothing to do with their intrinsic interest or difficulty.  I doubt that would ever change in the future.

You could have people vote on whether threads are interesting or useful.  Ah... you already do that!  Maybe ESRI could consider expanding this function to show the distribution of votes rather than just giving an average value.  Perhaps that would satisfy Andrea.

[JimBarry]

I've no idea if this would be feasable or not, but recently I've experienced several times that someone posts a question in the German Forum and the exact same question - in English, obviously - in one of the English fori. I think it would be helpful to have a link between these two, so anyone considering posting on one thread can quickly check if there is such a "sister thread" and if maybe the question has already been answered. At least the poster should have the ability to mark a question as answered or no longer relevant (even if there was no answer to it).

Every thread has a unique and somewhat human readable and RESTful-style URL.  Nothing stopping the original poster or anyone replying to include links into both of the threads to cross-reference them to the other.

Not sure that's a task we can always count on a moderator to do, due to the obvious language skill needed.

Great idea though, of course.

[JimBarry]

I liked that too but after a few years realized that easy or hard were in the eyes of the beholder.  By the end (of the old forums) the rational thing was for people with questions to mark them all as hard because that offered a better incentive for people to answer them.  I also noticed that FAQs and newbie questions tended to be marked hard while questions from veterans were often marked as easy, perhaps because experienced people have a sense that most questions are easy to someone.  People who were posing programming related questions almost always marked them as hard, no matter what.

Thus, the marking of the questions had little or nothing to do with their intrinsic interest or difficulty.  I doubt that would ever change in the future.

You could have people vote on whether threads are interesting or useful.  Ah... you already do that!  Maybe ESRI could consider expanding this function to show the distribution of votes rather than just giving an average value.  Perhaps that would satisfy Andrea.

Very good points, clearly.   Thanks Bill.

Yeah, these things like ratings, degree of difficulty, voting, marking as answered -- none of these things are air-tight and do contain at least some subjectivity, given the perspective and mood of the poster and the responder.   But for the most part they are probably more valuable to many users than having none of them.

[KatharinaDubach]

Every thread has a unique and somewhat human readable and RESTful-style URL.  Nothing stopping the original poster or anyone replying to include links into both of the threads to cross-reference them to the other.

Not sure that's a task we can always count on a moderator to do, due to the obvious language skill needed.

Great idea though, of course.

I can fully understand the language problem. Maybe one could include an invitation to cross-reference in the "code of conduct" (if there is such a thing, I don't know).

[Anonymous User]

Original User: alnesbit

Very good points, clearly.   Thanks Bill.

Yeah, these things like ratings, degree of difficulty, voting, marking as answered -- none of these things are air-tight and do contain at least some subjectivity, given the perspective and mood of the poster and the responder.   But for the most part they are probably more valuable to many users than having none of them.

Agreed! Thank you

[WilliamHuber]

Yeah, these things like ratings, degree of difficulty, voting, marking as answered -- none of these things are air-tight and do contain at least some subjectivity, given the perspective and mood of the poster and the responder.   But for the most part they are probably more valuable to many users than having none of them.

Having information about the quality of a thread is useful and welcome, Jim.  My point, though, is that the self-ratings of difficulty in fact do not tell us anything about difficulty or quality.  They are misleading in that regard.  I am advocating not implementing such a feature because I believe (based on anecdotal evidence from the old forums) that it is less than useless.

You might take a tip from how peer-reviewed publications and Web pages are ranked: namely, by direct citations and links, respectively.  If you made it as easy as possible for people to search for solutions in the forums and to reference them, you could build up a useful network of cross-references in the forums that would reveal which postings are worth highlighting.  This could also be the nucleus of an automated FAQ, something we have been desperate to have for more than a decade.

An example of what I mean by "as easy as possible" would be an automatic background search of the text in any new thread.  After the poster has drafted it, she could be presented with a synopsis of closely related materials already in the forum and asked to indicate which, if any, appear to be related.  Links to those could appear with her initial message.  With a good search facility I suspect many threads would stop right there because their originators would find the answers they wanted (but didn't know how to search for).

[Anonymous User]

Original User: jbarry

Having information about the quality of a thread is useful and welcome, Jim. My point, though, is that the self-ratings of difficulty in fact do not tell us anything about difficulty or quality. They are misleading in that regard. I am advocating not implementing such a feature because I believe (based on anecdotal evidence from the old forums) that it is less than useless.

You might take a tip from how peer-reviewed publications and Web pages are ranked: namely, by direct citations and links, respectively. If you made it as easy as possible for people to search for solutions in the forums and to reference them, you could build up a useful network of cross-references in the forums that would reveal which postings are worth highlighting. This could also be the nucleus of an automated FAQ, something we have been desperate to have for more than a decade.

An example of what I mean by "as easy as possible" would be an automatic background search of the text in any new thread. After the poster has drafted it, she could be presented with a synopsis of closely related materials already in the forum and asked to indicate which, if any, appear to be related. Links to those could appear with her initial message. With a good search facility I suspect many threads would stop right there because their originators would find the answers they wanted (but didn't know how to search for).

I was just making a distinction between something that can be somewhat useful versus something that's useless. Thanks for clarifying that I missed your point. In your experience allowing users to rate the difficulty of their questions is less useful than nothing. As a side note, for a long time I have been actually quite surprised (and still am) that all questions weren't self-rated as 5 on the old forums. I mean, one has a question, decided to take time to log in a post it, why not mark it a 5, maxing the incentive for an answer?

Interesting points about auto search and automated FAQ. Seeing what's out there. Thanks.