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[MrEen]

I think someone coined them "help vampires". I haven't seen a real problem on here, although a number of my responses to OP's have already remained unanswered. I was just wondering if there was anything we could do at all to encourage "engagement".

I've seen a few of those. Even tried helping one 3 different times. That one no longer receives any replies from me.

On the flip side, I've seen troublesome users that actually changed their tune. One went from being on my foe list to someone I even PM'ed an offer of help on something they mentioned in a chat thread.

I find that in the end it balances out nicely. Most are good people here, and demonstrably thankful for the help they receive.

[SMG]

One thing I must add though, is that it can be SO rewarding when you see a nice conclusion with [SOLVED] added to the title .. .. gives that nice fuzzy warm feeling inside.

Even moreso when what you post seems like a rather trivial observation in the scheme of things and it's what lead the OP to figure it out giving you exuberant thanks. I had one of those this week. I really thought the issue was going to need someone with more experience than me to resolve. I then politely asked them to mark the post as solved so it might help others and they did so literally within minutes of me posting submit on the post.

[Drugwash]

[...] if I stumble upon an older post that is unanswered, I now check when the user last visited.
I've left some unanswered when I spotted that they never returned after making the first post.
[...] I'm not going to ask for more info to help diagnose an issue from someone that may never return.

There is one side of the story that nobody touched yet. Incidentally I fall into that category myself.
User posts asking for help. They're automatically subscribed to notifications of reply.
Nobody answers. User gets no e-mail notification of reply.
User waits and waits. From previous experience they know it's rude to bump own thread so they refrain from doing that. (not all people read the rules)
User assumes issue is unfixable or nobody cares; in some cases they may find help in other place(s). It may not even occur to them to return to previous boards and share their findings. It's possible they didn't even bookmark those boards, and it's also possible they completely forgot about those boards after a while since they received no notifications.

On a personal note, I've been around the Internet for almost 20 years. Been member of a lot of boards, and many/most of them considered bumping own threads as rude. It became a second nature to me to avoid doing that. And yeah, I kinda skip reading the rules when signing up because generally they all say the same things.
And yeah, I'm one that waits for e-mail reply notifications instead of refreshing a page every two minutes or whatever. And very rarely bookmark the threads. And I have a very bad memory lately, so bad that I already forgot most of my life - let alone what forum boards I may have posted a question that has received no answer.

So maybe not all first-time-posters are ill-intended or selfish or reckless or whatever they may be called. Maybe they just forgot. Or maybe they are still patiently waiting for an answer. I know I'm still waiting for (usable) answers to a few threads here.

Thank you for reading.

[BG405]

The problem is often down to threads getting knocked off the first (few) page(s) before someone who knows the solution sees them. It's so easy to miss stuff even when frequently hitting the "Unread Posts" or whatever.

Even moreso when what you post seems like a rather trivial observation in the scheme of things and it's what lead the OP to figure it out1

Indeed, sometimes you just need to give the right hints! Just now someone with a WiFi issue not only took my hint but replied with a link to the powersave settings, which I was unsure of, so we both helped each other out .. great stuff!

     ---
Another thing .. when someone bumps their own thread, I assume that thread then disappears off the "Unanswered Topics" list? If this is the case, perhaps a modification could be made so that it only does so when someone else posts in their thread.

[hydrurga]

Another thing .. when someone bumps their own thread, I assume that thread then disappears off the "Unanswered Topics" list? If this is the case, perhaps a modification could be made so that it only does so when someone else posts in their thread.

If that is indeed the case, that is a very good call, imo.

[Drugwash]

The problem is often down to threads getting knocked off the first (few) page(s) before someone who knows the solution sees them. It's so easy to miss stuff even when frequently hitting the "Unread Posts" or whatever.

To fix that there should be a mechanism in place to bring back to attention such threads automatically on a timer, rotating unsolved threads in the hierarchy. But that would require having a well established and working system of marking the threads as solved, which currently relies solely on OPs' marking them as such by editing the thread title, which is subjective and unreliable. Ideas?

[Dark Owl]

Mentioning his post was more of a gentle nudge to every dedicated forum user, like yourself and Kaidatcha Man, who both are one of many friendly and very experienced users on this forum, to focus some of the attention to the unanswered topics, some of which are posted by newcomers, whose post is their very first post on this forum. I have been neglecting the unanswered topics for a while. Some of those posts simply need a bump, but many newcomers dont know that they need to bump their post.

I'm happy to bring my (in)experience to bear, but I find there is so much traffic I have to ration my input.

Thanks for the tip about Unanswered Topics, perhaps that should be my first port of call... but then I wouldn't be educating myself with the current hot topics.

Some posters simply don't help themselves by being intractable, rambling, or not considering how their post will come over to others (over-sharing).

[BG405]

a mechanism in place to bring back to attention such threads automatically ...
Ideas?

This could be achieved if the user can set how far back the rotation range extends i.e. stuff from the past few days/weeks/whatever. Otherwise it will result in hiding newer posts; in itself creating a sort of "cache-22" scenario.

[Drugwash]

This could be achieved if the user can set how far back the rotation range extends i.e. stuff from the past few days/weeks/whatever. Otherwise it will result in hiding newer posts

I'm afraid leaving this exclusively to the user we would (almost) always see the maximum possible range everytime, so this really should be based on a much more elaborate algorithm, such as intertwining newest threads with oldest threads, then reassigning them a secondary hierarchy that would be considered in next rotation. Maybe also assigning a maximum number of rotations until they would eventually be left to sink.

[BG405]

I'm thinking of it being an opt-in feature along the lines of "Show a selection of recent threads from [select] long ago" maybe with a "rotate" option.

[Drugwash]

Whatever the board software allows.

[BG405]

Whatever the board software allows.

I'm not sure what it does allow; this varies across sites I suppose, depending on what features the provider offers on their servers. I'm more familiar with VBulletin and have done my time as a Moderator on a popular Forum for several years so know some of the ins and outs of it, but not so familiar with the way this Forum software operates.

What's this one? phpbb? Not sure. Haven't looked into this stuff in ages.

[Dark Owl]

What's this one? phpbb? Not sure.

Yes, as announced at the bottom of every page.

I'm not sure what it does allow; this varies across sites I suppose, depending on what features the provider offers on their servers. I'm more familiar with VBulletin and have done my time as a Moderator on a popular Forum for several years so know some of the ins and outs of it, but not so familiar with the way this Forum software operates.

Most, if not all, forum software runs on server-side scripting to operate a database (in this case PHP, but I guess other programming languages could be used such as ASP, Java, or even Python). Somebody wanting to run a forum either uses a "consumer" build-your-own-forum host (where your forum is a section of an overall umbrella forum, with no - or very limited - control over how the forum looks), or provides their own hosting and imports the forum framework (or even writes their own - I have seen that!). phpBB and Xenforo are popular choices.

Having imported the framework, the code is yours. Tools are provided for a lot of customisation (similar to building a website with Wordpress), but (almost) anything can be done by modifying the code (if you have the skills). That's at the owner level, not admin or moderators.

[ricardogroetaers]

I won't go anywhere near a machine that is so old.

Code: Select all

Machine: v: 03CA.MP00.20081125.KTW date: 11/25/2008 

My computer is running LM20 smoothly (besides some loud fan noise) and was produced in 2009.

It looks like no one will get close to my machine.

Code: Select all

Machine:
  Type: Desktop System: POSITIVO product: POS-MI945AA v: 4.0 
  Mobo: Desenvolvido para Positivo Informatica model: POS-MI945AA v: 4.0 
  BIOS: Positivo Informatica S/A v: 16.3   date: 09/20/2007 

[Kadaitcha Man]

It looks like no one will get close to my machine.

It looks like you might be wrong. There was a 2002 recently.

viewtopic.php?t=321553

[BG405]

Yes, as announced at the bottom of every page.

Course it is .. D'Oh! (slaps forehead) .. I should perhaps be forgiven as it's a tiny font?

[ZakGordon]

I used to post a lot on another Linux-related forum but left after a while, partially due to my frustration that many OP's were not coming back after their opening post, or were bowing out in the middle after I'd put some work in to resolving their issue. I reckon part of that was due to the fact that some folk post the same issue in several forums, grab the answer and then don't bother sharing the results around the other forums. Some posters were serial offenders - I think someone coined them "help vampires". I haven't seen a real problem on here, although a number of my responses to OP's have already remained unanswered. I was just wondering if there was anything we could do at all to encourage "engagement".

My apologies for this off-topic comment.

I had wondered if there was a 'market' for overloading open-source help forums, you know likely 'paid for' by those companies that hate open-source etc? For me it took 5 mins to suggest the guy read the 'How to get Help' thread so if he was serious, he'd get better responses (so no skin of my nose), but for the deep technical stuff i can see that get wearing after a while if the person seeking help just posts and runs, or makes a situation more complex than it need be for x,y,z reasons.

Did the guy come back to his thread yet? Ah yes he did, and he seems to be motivated to get his low-powered hardware to work, i might go chime in with Bodhi perhaps? So in this case the eventual responses did actualyl help, so well done everyone