I can't help but notice that there aren't any unanswered questions, but very few solved questions. If an answer solves your query, please do use the tick mark to mark it as a correct solution. This would really help everyone: both people searching for clues and people looking for unsolved queries to help out. Please do not forget to thank your helper by giving the answer karma :)
With the latest update to the forum (askbot 0.7.32), admins/moderators can mark answers as correct on behalf of people posting the questions. The default timeout to be able to do so was set to 7 but I have bought it down to 0. If you are a admin or a moderator, I recommend you go through prior questions and answers and mark the best one as correct.
Also, it is in general a good idea to exercise your rights to vote up or down answers liberally.
It helps if the OP marks the question as solved. In the absence , if staff could mark them it would be great, it really helps others find solutions if questions are marked as solved.
@bodhi.zazen I have made you a moderator in this forum now. So feel free to do that yourself. There is no separate staff
Thanks for pointing this out. I was one of the guilty! One of my questions had been solved. However, not only had I overlooked the tick marks, but it took me ten minutes to find them.
(They are by the answers to your own questions! They are grey.)
Also, I couldn't find a better way of marking it as solved than editing my original post to put "[Solved]" in front of it.
While doing that I thanked the people who answered. I hope the best answer gets some karma but this isn't clear to me yet.
Maybe I'm not the only one struggling to get to terms with this new forum. I am sure it will be worth persevering with.
Voting up answer also helps. But yes, adding "solved" help web search crawler…
I see quite often questions of the type: printer, graphics, network does not work, kernel crashes, booting fails. Mostly unanswered (unless someone had exactly the same hardware and symptoms) or answered with some debugging suggestions users are aware of.
On the other hand there is the https://fedoraproject.org/wiki knowledge base. Should we "post a comment" with a link to the wiki specific to the given problem and Ask the user to continue discussion in the "post a comment" way? That will tend to convert Ask into a mailing list, but on the other hand it will help to increase the level of users skills, and offer an opportunity to update the wiki - i have noticed today for example that http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_printing_problems mentioned Fedora 16(!) as latest.
Of course if someone knows the solution to the problem he can still post it, ignoring all the guessing and debugging procedures.
I personally, always provide links to wiki pages if they're available. Its the first step of troubleshooting: see what the docs say. However, I post asking the requester to update the question with the errors etc if the wiki page doesnt solve it for them. Its ok to comment to request or post information. Answers should just be limited to actual solutions so theyre easy to find IMO.
Many questions being answered but not solved might also mean this forum is not efficiently solving people's problems rather than people being ungrateful.
I'm only talking about ones that have been solved. As more people join the forum, it'll get more efficient. It's very very young at the moment :)
I would be reluctant to mark a thread as solved unless it clear that the OP has been satisfied, perhaps leaving a comment without marking the question as solved. I would not read much into the meaning of threads marked as solved / unsolved. I doubt people are ungrateful, I would have assumed busy
I think overall the quality of the questions is a little low at the moment, a situation exacerbated by the fact that not many users seem to vote up the good ones. On top of this as you are highlighting the people asking the questions often don't mark an answer as their favourite even when they have clearly responded in a comment saying it solved their issue. Some times they don't even vote it up!
Over time hopefully this will go away but only once more people have reached the various thresholds needed to perform actions to maintain the quality of the site.
It wouldn't hurt if we had some guiding blog posts etc around the site like the StackOverflow guys had both when they developed it originally and as they have made updates.
The guiding posts are a great idea. I urge everyone here to please blog a short page on "How to use ask fedora". That should be a start!
@FraciscoD_, so that we have a number of similar but incomplete guidelines? Do you imagine anybody reading all of them? I think we need a site wide definitive guide that can be improved by members over time.
The problem is those (with questions) are all newbies, while they're all professionals on the stackoverflow. That is the difference. We should have ability to mark something as answers using voting or something.
there are some strict karma requirements. first of all there there is no upvoting for a decent question. Most times people solve their own problems but cannot accept their answers because you need >20 karma. You cannot post links to substantiate the answer because it again requires karma. You cannot post comments as well.
What I dont like here is that badges (that are pretty useless and is just a kiddish gimmick) are easier to get than karma.
So it is natural to prefer superuser. [My personal experience: I posted same questions here and in superuser and it is the latter where I got responses. In here I just get some stupid badge]
Please file an RFE with upstream. We don't develop askbot, we only deploy it. If you can get superuser to open source their software, I'm sure we could look into using it.
I have noticed a trend of many users asking questions and may be not logging in the portal back for long time. Also few questions are answered, but the users have reported the tweaks to not be working out. That primarily is the main reason having lot of unsolved questions.
I believe the only reason at the moment is because this web site is still very young (Nov 8th 2011).
But considering the community is growing fast I will see some future splits as well in this project like the splits regularly happening in stackoverflow.com almost on a weekly basis...
look how many:
http://stackexchange.com/sites?sort=default
Once the number of users will be considerably larger (3 maybe 5k) we will get high level answers each minute!
Asked: 2011-11-24 03:35:32 -0600
Seen: 3,532 times
Last updated: Oct 25 '13
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+1 hehehehe
How funny, I was just been able to set an answer as correct in your question :) Perhaps that's a diff with stackoverflow where only owner can set answer as accepted. coorect and accepted are different things to me. At the same time I see the answer you set as correct is no longer such.
What "tick mark"?
EDIT: I found it, but why can't you mark "comments" as correct answers?
Because comments are supposed to be comments, not answers. A solution should be provided as an answer, not a comment. Comments are for requesting extra information.
Very friendly to give me a minus point in karma.