Hello
I am an user of a NodeBB forum since 4 months. And I am already fed up by users asking how to mark their issue as solved. The first time I wanted to mark one of my issues as solved, I had to search the forum to find an answer by a more experienced user on the trick ‘turn the topic into a question, then you can mark it as solved’. If the computer can do it, why ask users to do it ? In other words, if the distinction topic/question can’t be easily solved in the software architecture, why not enable the ‘solved’ option for topics, and if the user picks it, assume that the ‘topic’ was really a question from the beginning, turn the topic into a question automatically and solve it ?
Gotcha, yeah, I think that makes sense, I can’t think of a serious reason why all topics can’t be marked as solved, regardless of whether they were originally posted as a question or not.
It might be useful though to have the option to set some subforums as questions-only, where only admins and mods can start plain topics and everything else is automatically a question. No idea if this is already possible as I don’t run a NodeBB forum myself (yet). But I can see how this would be handy for support forums.
I’m guessing to draw attention to questions: In the topics list, your topic has a bright yellow “Unsolved” button, which prompts users that there might be something there where they can help. The distinction is more important before the question is answered correctly, than afterwards. If all topics are potentially questions, then questions won’t be getting extra attention.
@panos said in Why is the distinction topic/question so important ?: > The distinction is more important before the question is answered correctly, than afterwards
the key word for my question is ‘afterwards’. I’m not suggesting to remove the distinction, I’m annoyed by the extra step when the matter is solved in the poster’s mind.
