Improving the www.ads-software.com support forums

Well, since the forums are very active and a lot of new threads are created, maybe an email notification system is the best idea. Even if my topic is far far away, an email will let me know if it has new replies.

E-mail subscriptions would be lovely. Subscribing to a thread via RSS is helpful, but e-mail is definitely my preferred method.

adding a “Remember Me” on login could be a great feature too…

a FAQ system that someone can peruse to find answers without flooding the forums with the same questions over and over.

a ‘resolved’ button for the post author to acknowledge that it was resolved instead of waiting for a moderator to figure out if it was or not.

How about segmenting by user type: end user, admin, developer?

Some thoughts off of the top of my head:

1) More moderation (more moderators?), plus better ability to flag posts (and posters) as SPAM.

2) Here’s a crazy idea: some way of auto(-magic?) linking of WP functions and template tags to their related Codex entries? Almost every answer/response I’ve given in the support forums has involved linking to the Codex.

3) Some form of standardization/convention for tagging, to facilitate search and cross-reference.

4) Perhaps some means of separating posts by WP version point-release? (What was a relevant problem/question in 2.7 might not be in 2.9, etc.)

Looking forward to seeing what others have to say. I’m sure other responses will get me thinking in other areas, too.

And someone already gave me an idea:

a FAQ system that someone can peruse to find answers without flooding the forums with the same questions over and over.

How about a mechanism for marking one post as a duplicate of another post, which would be used for a moderator to close the duplicate, and direct all responses to the original (or, even, to merge the duplicate post and responses into the original)?

why not just charge a small fee for support and hire a competent and well trained support staff? Isn’t that similar to the model WP suggests for theme developers? It seems that such a plan would be massively beneficial to the entire community. Perhaps allow access to very basic issues for free, and attach the fee to more advanced issues. If WP has 10 million users and only 10% sign up for $30/year advanced support, that would provide WP epic flexibility in the support arena.

^^ based on their profile yeah. re: segmenting user type: end user = all users who haven’t specified they are sys admin or developer in their profile.

if ! give ability for end user to resolve a post create

Moderator tool: “Create FAQ from resolved post.” when setting a post to resolved, will bring up a form that the moderator can create a faq from the post to automate the process a little for the faqs (if decide to do a faq system).

STEP 1. Move to software appropriate for a forum like this.

DONE!

Did you expect more steps? Sorry to disappoint you! ??

STEP 1. Move to software appropriate for a forum like this.

I think bbPress is more than capable of handling Support Forum needs and functionality.

I like the idea of having segmented user types, but I don’t think that addresses the problem I hear (and experience) most often: questions often go unanswered.

I think the best way of fixing that problem is to incentivize answering questions. Maybe make it more game-like. Stack Overflow does this with ‘badges’ and ‘reputation points.’ I know SO isn’t what you guys want, but they’ve done a great job incentivizing answering questions, and because of that, people actually answer the questions.

@frumph – there’s already a resolved button (off to the right) except for posts in the Miscellaneous and Feedback forums.

a ‘resolved’ button for the post author to acknowledge that it was resolved instead of waiting for a moderator to figure out if it was or not.

There is that … It’s a dropdown, mind, but it’s there.