Grouping Issues or Comments


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Following a specific issue in the Application Support section is hard for the more popular apps.

 

Here's the current workflow:

I have a bug. I search for the bug on the support forums. I find a potential match. I go to that post. I then want to follow that post to see how others ave responded to it and how the originally poster posts their progress. If other people are posting their own issues in between posts about the issue I'm following, I have to read every single post to determine if it is about the issue I'm talking about. This is relatively quick per post if the user quotes the post they are responding about but not if they don't Even if they do quote the post they are responding about, it is still a long task to determine if every post in between the post I care about and future posts are relevant. In computer science terms, this is like an array that holds several categories of topics and has to be re-indexed every time you want to find a chain of logic.

 

Proposition:

Replies appear as sub-comments in a thread. Ex. Reddit replies to a thread.

 

Explanation:

1. Originally I was going to suggest that the forum should model format exactly like Reddit but this thread suggests that that makes it harder for application supporters to find relevant posts and it makes it easier for support requests to start a redundant thread if they don't know where to post.

2. To compromise the above, I propose that users still cannot create new threads, but instead, they can reply to posts and their posts are displayed as a branch of the post they are replying to. For example:

 

Take this image taken from Reddit about the new spaceinvaderone video about migrating to SWAG:

 

image.thumb.png.baaf138445ef40c5a18d6dc3bce16146.png

 

Here I'll define some terms in context of this picture:

Thread: the post about the new spaceinvaderone video entitled "New Spaceinvader One Video: How to Migrate from Letsencrypt to the New Swag Container"

Comment: Valpo13's comment starting with "Thanks /u/spaceinvaderone. I think I can speak behalf of everyone..."

Reply: Spaceinvaderone's reply starting with "Thankyou very much /u/Valpo13 for your message..."

 

In my proposition for this forum, the matching definitions would be:

Thread: Current definition of threads/topics in Unraid forums. For Application Support, this would be the thread that maps to a specific application support thread.

Comment: An original issue or request for support raised by a user.

Reply: All posts that relate to a given comment and are initiated by a reply button. Note: the reply button would not replace the quote button but would be an addition.

 

Arguments for why this would be beneficial:

1. It immediately becomes easier to follow a specific issue that a user posts and I can quickly identify if it was resolved and how it was resolved.

2. Less text on a page. Quoting for the purposes of maintaining documentation on who you're replying to becomes unnecessary. Less text make it easier to a user/app author to parse posts and threads.

3. Maintains the ease of finding relevant issues for app supporters (and users) because all app support is still part of a single thread.

Edited by voyager12
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