Prominent display of forum topics with 0 replies

Hmm. Although I agree some sort of view that allows you to find the posts with no replies might be useful, doing it by making posts sticky strikes me as not being such a good idea - either posts no one wants to answer will stick around too long, or else (more likely), people will get in the habit of replying to posts their tired of looking past with nonsense replies to get them off of the front page.

That said, a view-page that lists all of the unreplied to posts sounds like a fairly easy thing to implement.

I wouldn't mind seeing this implemented. I generally don't care about the chronological order of support-forum posts, but I have gone searching for posts without replies, just as you have.

Playing devil's advocate for a minute, though: Won't this just mean that every new visitor's first view of the support forum will be an entire screenful of questions which don't have any replies? And how is the sight of that big list supposed to make them feel warm and fuzzy? Won't it just tend to subliminally suggest that nobody is home?

Although, actually, I don't believe that is what will happen. What will happen is that every question on the forums will quickly attract some sort of response so that it doesn't embarrass us by sitting around, stale, on the top of the listings for days or weeks at a time. Responding quickly will turn into a game. My fear is that many of these super-quick responses to questions will sacrifice quality for speed: they will be boilerplate phrases, requests for clarification, one-liner links to the documentation (which probably isn't of much help, or why would the user be asking for support?), rude suggestions to "RTFM" or "reinstall Windows", out-and-out wrong answers, and/or offers of paid consulting services. These responses won't necessarily make the questioner go away happy. They will just make the questioner go away: their post will drop off the top of the list, and now we're back to square one, where the question remains unanswered but nobody notices.

If we measure "speed of response" but don't include "quality of response" we are likely to get exactly what we ask for. This is precisely the problem with, say, telephone support operators, who are paid to answer calls quickly and efficiently but not necessarily accurately or thoroughly.

All in all, though, I'd give this idea a +1 because even a poor response like "I thought I saw the answer in the manual once, but I forget where", or "I will solve your problem if you send me $20" is probably better than no response at all. This could be worth a try, and I don't think it would hurt. The worst I can say is that it might not help.

While I can't totally agree with the sticky idea, I would certainly like to see my unresponded posts floating to the top occasionally. And that includes the one I that I am the only one who has posted a response (trying to get a real one).

I think there are a lot of unintended consequeneces in this idea and don't think it would make sense as the sitewide default.

If you look at http://drupal.org/forum/1?sort=asc&order=Replies you can see the forum posts sorted in this manner already and...it's not really valauble. You have to go 62 pages into the forum to find the first post with a reply.

However, I think that sorted view provides the solution: people who want to find posts without a response can use this sorted view to get the data they need.

Could the home page of each forum be tabbed with two tabs: "Recent Posts" (default) and "Posts Needing Reply" (or something)?

Another consideration: just because there is a reply doesn't mean the poster's issue is resolved. Sometimes a reply is "Ya, I have that issue too, blah, blah.." ...or a reply simply does not resolve the issue.

Maybe each post should have a checkbox for "issue resolved" and those not checked go into the separate list so that "Posts Needing Reply" becomes "Unresolved Posts". Also, such a checkbox might make it easier to create the View needed to show this page? This is moving toward making forums work a little more like issue queues.

UPDATE: Oh, the sorted view mentioned above might make more sense that tabs - but perhaps sort based on the checkbox?

The "Contributor links" block could be a good place for this. Or, since that block is already pretty long, we could split it into two: "Contributor links, coding" and "Contributor links, support and docs", and move the handbook links to the new block along with the forum links. To make the list manageable, we could filter out those that are older than, say, three weeks or a month. Something like

• Unanswered support posts last month:
  • 18 Pre installation questions
  • 55 Installation problems
  • ...and so on...

The check box/"answered doesn't neccessarily mean solved" problem can be solved with tagging when/if changing taxonomy terms with comments is implemented.

The "no way to indicate a resolved issue" points out a common frustration I have when I answer support requests in the forum -- namely, that they are very "different" (at least, culturally) from an issue in a queue.

In an issue queue, we would all find it incumbent to:
a) make sure the title of the issue matched the topic (in the forum, topics are often named "Please help me now" rather than "Can not add posts to forums", for instance). While some of us can retitle topics, we generally don't within the forums, AFAIK. This makes it substantially harder for folks searching the forums to determine if their issue has already been posted, and makes it substantially more of a "one-off" situation when you respond to a post.
b) appropriately set a status flag, whether to fixed, won't fix, or what have you. As has been stated, there isn't much way to do this in the forums as they currently stand. And, the lack of such a system (short of locking a thread) means that old "resolved" threads are often bumped to the top as people respond to them without realizing the conversation has been dead for years.

Just FYI, there is already an issue and plans for breaking the contributor links block into more manageable chunks: http://drupal.org/node/225202

One thing that I'd really love to see is to provide a feature something like issues have where I can say I want to see only my forum posts or only my book pages, etc. For issues, you can say show me issues that I initiated or in which I have participated. And advanced search can limit the content type. If we can put those two ideas together it would help a lot and may very well drive down the traffic on "recent posts."

Unanswered posts is a good idea, certainly it helps a lot in the issue queue. Personally I think all support forums should be merged into one big one as well - no-one pays attention to pre/update/post installation etc. at all so better to have everything in one place.

to @jcfiala - #1

either posts no one wants to answer will stick around too long,

Why should a question not be quickly answered even with a refer to better place where to get an answer?
Does it cost to much effort and time?

to @mechfish #2

And how is the sight of that big list supposed to make them feel warm and fuzzy? Won't it just
tend to subliminally suggest that nobody is home?

The list of or with reply=0 could be easily transfered after a reasonable period of time (say 1 day) to
a dedicated container! May this be a Solution?

to @Rick Hood #5 That is a great Idea - Subscribe!

Could the home page of each forum be tabbed with two tabs: "Recent Posts" (default)
and "Posts Needing Reply" (or something)?

to @zirvap #6 Even better and usefull Solution. Subscribe!

Unanswered support posts last month: ....etc.etc.

Other Solutions ? The problem is only , are this implementable procedure on the actual Drupal.org Site:

Answer: No, not in short time. The redesign is on the planning stage and evaluation stage
see:

http://association.drupal.org/6-drupal-org-redesign-proposals-recieved-a...
http://buytaert.net/drupal-org-status-update

Cheers

Edit: Just want to add a really very small requets that might be implemented in short time and want to know what you thing about:

x. Make My Recent post I mean registered user of course) be sortable by Replies !

Changing title. If views is still running on d.o, it'd be short work to create a view which does this and put it as a tab on /forum.

FYI: views is indeed running on d.o, and is here to stay. So, if someone wants to provide php for a D5 views object with the desired view, I'd be happy to install it on http://scratch.drupal.org for people to play with it and see if they like it.

p.s. Being able to answer an issue with a comment like this is exactly why porting project* to use views for everything is such a high priority. Instead of "wait for the 3 of us on Earth who understand that crazy query building code to get around to it", it'll be so nice to answer feature requests for project/issue/release browsing functionality with "if you provide an exported view, we can try it on scratch".

Here's an export. Getting views to provide the tab wasn't happening on my test site for some reason, so left that out.

There's also the question of whether we want this on each forum, or just a single view off the /forum index.

Actually, I had disabled views since nobody was really using it and I thought we could use the memory elsewhere. But if we find a valid use case we could enable it again.

While I'm not sure about this particular request, there are 2 features we can do with Views RIght Now that would be valuable:

1) New projects -- currently projects are ordered by most recent release, but people raelly want to be able to track new projects as well.
2) Unread forum posts.

Hi All involved in this discussion. I'm going to repeat that I care about Drupal.org and as an inscribed member of the Association I do my best to motivate who have the access to functionality on Drupal.org to take steps against this that really I'm aware of:

Forum Before you start Post with reply 0 = 483 Latest 4 years 27 weeks ago
Forum Installing Drupal Post with reply 0 = 1664 Latest 6 years 5 weeks ago
Forum Upgrading Drupal Post with reply 0 = 558 Latest 4 years 25 weeks ago
Forum Post Installation Post with reply 0 = 15342 Latest 4 years 29 weeks ago
Forum Converting to Drupal Post with reply 0 = 258 Latest 4 years 25 weeks ago
Forum Module development Post with reply 0 = 4333 Latest 5 years 33 weeks ago
Forum Theme developmet Post with reply 0 = 1826 Latest 5 years 25 weeks ago
Forum Translations Post with reply 0 = 229 Latest 4 years 42 weeks ago

a TOTAL of 24.693 posting with replies = 0

This is of course an aproximate counting because I had to go through each Forum and each page to summarize the facts above. I'm sure not entitled to critisize because I do not know Drupal good enough to discuss programming and settings to apply to solve this situation, but I can immagine that this ammount of deprecated ammout of data may (I guess) influence the search function on Drupal.org (and maybe other application performance sections) and it gives a bad impression of Drupal.org Site , at it look like, as of we do not care to give a minimum of answer or hint or link or refer to the questions in the Forums of our registered members.

In name of all Drupal members I please you to do something to organise this in a better way.

Thanks

Did I shock someone or there is no way to handle that?

This is priority in my Opinion. We should take care of every one on Drupal.org!!

This is whay I cahnged the Status. Please provide Solutions!!!

I certainly would like to see a way to view unanswered posts, especially more than 24 hrs old (they tend to never get answered if they are older than that) and a way for me to see MY forum posts that haven't been answered (they tend to get lost in my issue traffic). Doing this might help eliminate the need for people bumping posts. And, BTW, Wolf, you wouldn't have even counted those that the original author bumped trying to get an answer.

Hi Nancy, I undestand what you mind, i come up about this because i found some result on what I was looking for by chanse and find out that there was still posting 4 years old without answer. I'm really not so expert but this horrible ammount of posting is useless. I can just guess that is also making searching on Drupal.org more difficult.

BTW Thanks for your feedback. I would really see that handled in a different manner.
Cheers

This is whay I cahnged the Status. Please provide Solutions!!!

@wolfflow: Let me remind you that everyone here is a volunteer. If you want solutions and others aren't providing them, then it's time for you to step up and help to provide them yourself. In comment #15 dww made it very clear what needed to happen to accomplish what has been suggested in this issue. In comment #16 catch then provided such an exported view. However, nobody else has tested this exported view. That's why the status was "code needs review".

Though this issue may be very important to you, I don't believe it's accurate to call it critical. It's very rare to call a feature request critical, and the lack of this feature does not prevent drupal.org from functioning.

If you wish to see this issue move forward, I would suggest that you help test catch's patch in #16. To do so, you can install Drupal either on your local machine or a server somewhere. Enable and configure the forum module, and create some forums. Then, use the devel module to generate a bunch of forum postings. Install the views module and then import the exported view that catch provided in #16. Test it to see if it works. If not, then make changes to the view such that it does, and then provide that exported view here as a follow-up patch. This is actually a fairly easy patch to create/test, and doesn't require any PHP programming experience. I will be in #drupal on irc.freenode.net for a lot of today and tomorrow, and so if you try to test this and run into difficulties just ping me and I'll try to help you through the problems you have. It sounds like you're very motivated to do this, and that's great. But at some point you have to take the responsibility yourself if others aren't doing it when you'd like them to.

Also, FYI, dww has been/is away from electrons for a few weeks. When he gets back and has the chance, if there is a view that people have tested he'll install it on scratch.drupal.org so that everyone can test to see if it does what people really want it to do.

Hi aclight, I'm sure that I would make it, if I had the complete knowledge to implement all what you say. I have Drupal sites but my level of dealing with Views is very compromised. I'm jumping from Documentation and Tutorials about Views for Drupal 5.x as to Views for Drupal 6.x all the time. I am an honest man and have no difficulties to admit that i didn't get the poitn in Views yet: Maybe luck of knoledge?

Yes. I'm contributing to help out to define some pages for helping out People that are NENs and my support to the community is growing, I think I have made up to 4 or five pages yet on the Handbook ;-)

But be sure that if my work will find supporters, my learning curve will rise soon!!
Thanks for your offer, but is better that I get the knowledge well stable and furnished with the right background.

Cheers

P.S.

to @aclight BTW I'm a volonteer about 2 years 13 weeks please save and reserve comments like

...Let me remind you that everyone here is a volunteer.

that willbe very kind of you !!!!

@aclight: Thanks for the incredibly patient, detailed, thoughtful, and helpful reply in #24.

@wolfflow: Even if you know nothing about views, aclight just a) explained everything you have to do test this patch and b) offered to walk you through it, step by step in real time via IRC if you had any trouble. You then basically replied "thanks, but I don't know enough about views to follow your exact directions or take you up on your offer to walk me through it" and then criticized his comments reminding you that d.o is run by volunteers who don't always jump at the chance to scratch everyone else's current itch. Replies like this can eventually drive the patience and enthusiasm out of people like aclight, to the great detriment of the project overall. How can you better "get the knowledge well stable" than to have someone like aclight walk you through the process of testing this exported view? Think of how much you'd learn. No one cares how long you've been a member of drupal.org -- that doesn't make you a "volunteer" on its own. It's very nice that you've tried to contribute some handbook pages, that's great. But, that doesn't change the fact that if you feel this passionately about this feature, you need to do more than complain when other people aren't implementing it for you (which they already did, in fact, all you have to do is help test it).

Cheers,
-Derek

p.s. Yes, I just got back online after being gone for 2 weeks, so I'm going to be slow to catch up on everything that piled up or got bumped while I was away.

Dear Dww, I understand fully your point of View, and if @acLight is offended by my reply I'm really sorry for that.
Of course I would be delighted to receive such a help and offer like @acLight did to me.

My replay did not want to offend in any way but to describe that even if I want participate, I do not know ICR managing i never used it as of starting ones or twos on my on Site because I installed the IRC.module.

-Second: my contribution to the community really is a big effort in building a simple "Vocabulary"

page, and you know sure self what for a hassle is to publish here something and trying not to to something that can get refused, because despite the fact Drupal.org is very free in dealing with rules you have a lot of explanation difficulties on How to do and implement something.

I sure guess that on Drupal.org (somewhere) will be a post, a comment or even a full Tutorial about how to implement something. But to find that it takes some times YEARS.

We ALL know this Problem to good as to ignore it, but what make me some times really disappointed is that even under the good guys that are ready to give their support and help you get frustrated with statements like "Let me remind you that everyone here is a volunteer. " and this is and was the first sentence in his answer approaching me.

Please forgive me, if I say that was a bit to much for me. I admire your defense about @acLight statements, maybe is a close Friend of You, maybe you Know each other that much that's really OK. But I also struggle in "Forums" and politely defend the work of every body on Drupal.org, believe me.

But anyway this again do not compromise my continuously effort to help out on Drupal.org and neither will, I love to much Drupal and I will go through with it.

Kind Regards

Edit: add some link that IMHO will help to understand my engagement on Drupal.org
I also add to my Signature :

I'm a No English Native, remind

@wolfflow: A few things

1. I wasn't offended by your comments, so no worries.

2. If I offended you, I apologize. But when you make a statement like "Please provide Solutions" I interpreted this as you not understanding that everyone here is a volunteer, and that people do things that interest them. It seems that English is not your native language, and so perhaps you didn't intend to sound as forceful as I think you sounded. But also, some other similar open source projects *do* have people who are paid to do things like this, and I wanted to make sure you knew that Drupal.org *doesn't* have paid people to do things like this (as far as I know).

3. You don't need a Drupal module for IRC (that's only if you want to provide an IRC client on your Drupal website). See http://drupal.org/irc for lots of information on what IRC is and how to use it. I would recommend that you download a client, connect to irc.freenode.net, and hang out in the #drupal and/or #drupal-support channels for a while. I'm sure you'll find that you can learn a lot very quickly from reading other people's conversations or asking questions. In addition, you'll get to know people better, which is always nice.

4. Yes, dww and I know each other. We both work on the project module and other related modules that run the project management and issue tracking features of drupal.org and other websites that use these modules. We are also both used to new people who come to drupal.org and start demanding that people do things they want, and nobody takes kindly to those people. I realize that you have been a drupal.org member longer than I have (based on your user id), but that doesn't necessairly mean you are familiar with how things work around here. From your last message, it seems that you do have a pretty good sense of how things work, and that you didn't mean to imply that someone should stop what they were doing and complete this task.

So, with all of that, what I said in my last comment (#24) still applies. For this to happen, someone needs to test out catch's patch in #16 to see if it works, and if so then mark this issue RTBC. Then when dww gets time he'll put the view on scratch.drupal.org for more testing, and if things go well there it'll probably eventually be running on drupal.org.

BTW, I'll be out of town for most of the next two weeks, so I won't be able to help guide you through this. But testing this is really not very difficult, especially if you already have a test site that runs views (Drupal 5, views 1.x). I'm sure that you could find someone in #drupal-support who is willing to help you out if you run into difficulties. Just point them to this issue so they know what you're trying to accomplish.

Hi @acLight, Really they are a lot of misunderstandings here. First of all thank you sincerely for your patience with me and my "no native english". I'm sure that when you have few minutes to look on my Profile you may also see that my mother language is Italian, but I have a very polite Austrian education and my writings sure have no intention to complain. The word I used "Provide Solution" I use mistakenly, I did mind "Suggestions" as in Italian the word "Soluzione" often is interpreted as "suggestions". I really appreciate all the work You and All actively envolved with Drupal do here and I guess in many other places.

I principle are involved to help out "No english natives" because I can very good understand their difficulties to get understand with their poor english, so as happen to me. I'm doing that almost the 3 - 4 month intensively in the Forum and I will take charge of this Project because I have seen posting, comments and discussions very often on Drupal.org that are yet similar to this. @Dman know me yet very good and surely knows what I'm speaking here.

@to All - reading this

Belive me I spend almost 4 to 8 hours a day to learn how thinks can be made better for "No native english speakers"
here and I appreciate any help in this. My efforts lack of experience in managing projects in content management
area because I never did that before in any community. I am here because after 10 Years of having to do with IT i
discover this great Community and am open to any lessons, advise, suggestions, and what ever imply to learn to do
best in contributing on Drupal.org.

Please if you see and read my Post - allow me to say and remind "Any misleading interpretation" are surely
because @Wolfflow is a no native english speaker and writer and did not mean to complain but to ask and
notify something from the point of view of a "No native English" speaker.

Thanks to all
Cheers

I Will chip in here and put a strong vote in for the effort that wolfflow has been making to ACTUALLY HELP the documentation!
Although he started off (and occasionally continues) to sound a bit forceful in his phrasing, I've learnt that it's a combination of actual passion to help and a bit of trouble with the fine points of English nuance.

Just yesterday I was tempted to write an editorial post - a case study - PRAISING the way that wolfflow himself
- entered the community
- said things that were easy to get irritated by
- got told off
- or got totally ignored when he followed the instructions
- BUT - apologised and explained his motivations
- listened to the combined criticisms and advice
- Started reviewing the docs, providing actual feedback
- joined the doc team
- has continued with his mission to clarify the things that he found confusing the first time (!!)
- and is now working on the Drupal glossary and more.

I was going to raise this story, simply as a positive, constructive contrast to some of the wrong ways to get co-operation in the Drupal forums and doc projects :-)

Wolfflow is really really trying to help here, against all the language obstacles. And he's getting things done. It's unfortunate that the wording, or the ongoing campaign for issues that some folk have given up on, can read negatively.

.dan.

And although we know it, the old "we are all volunteers" line is really boring, and usually just raises the temperature of the discussion :-(. I've never seen anyone positively convinced by that argument, and I've personally headed off hundreds of whiny d.o. posts. Me, I prefer to offer them a quote for the price of the service they are requesting ;-)

I call for a moritorium on that rhetoric. I'm using big words because I think that wolfflow will get those ones ;-)
... off-topic, but I wanted to say this ...

Thank You. @Dman. Have no words! . Thank You from my Hearth sincerely.
I will continue my work here and am very Proud (Yet More) to be part of Drupal.org.
Cheers

I very seldom praised myself during my 48 years, but after 3 to 4 month of starting a Battle (June 9, 2008 ) for helping out NENs to get a better reference page where to find Common english expression & acronyms used on Drupal.org that we of Drupal Site Maintainers and Documentation Team can not aspect every Visitor can understand, finally the Day (August 20, 2008) has come that I could start over with an approximate agreement of some Leaders of the Documentation Team this project.

I'm working hard to settle as many Terms as possible and to provide good reference to easy and provide a "fast find doc resources" as to help anyone who wants to learn Drupal can have a better support, despite the mother language he or she have.

Today I get my first confirmation that my strategy is valuable from an user that just registered on Drupal 3 Days ago:
jwuk and that send me also an e-mail with thanks and acknowledgements.

--- "Message:

Many thanks, Wolf, that was quite an eye opener. I kind of imagined the
docs being written by a bunch of high priests, nobody admitted until they
have 10 years of Drupal behind them! It's wonderful to realise one can
join the community and help out. Keep it up, I hope I'll be able to join
in eventually, perhaps rather earlier than I'd supposed.

Cheers, John

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I warmly Thank John
for supporting my strategy on Drupal.org Documentation

moving

Is this still something that needs done? Over 4 years later and it's not done, so it doesn't seem that important to me..

I personally don't thing so. I allow myself to "close (wan't fix)" and assign it to me. Maybe it helps. Oh, the status is just because I still consider a weakness the fact that "help documentatio" even if really inproved a lot in the years is somehow weird to overview for newcomers and Forums is a too big issue for a Community like Drupal Community with only volontary support to manage.

P.S.
But it's really good that for Dries's sake there is such a History on Drupal.org. Thanks Dries