When someone asks a question to a help forum, it appears on the front page. Within a day or two, the question scrolls off the bottom of the screen into oblivion. Unless someone answers it within that two day window, it is highly unlikely it will ever be answered. Examining the last year of the University level help forum, 30% of the questions scrolled off the screen without reply.
This is abominable workflow management. Given that our answer fora are not only a main service we offer but also serve as first impression which attracts new members, this is utterly inacceptable. To remedy this defect, I propose that we add a new type of view of the fora. In additional to the existing view in chronological order, we should offer a view which shows only posts which have not recieved replies in reverse chronological order. This way, questions which have not been answred for a long time will stick out like a sore thumbs and attract the attention they need. One could put a link "unanswered" in the main menu with a number after it in parentheses indicating how many posts to help fora have not recieved replies yet, much as we now do with corrections, requests, orphanage, unclassified entries, unproven theorems. Even better, the entry for unclassified entries ought to be removed since the system does not allow one to add an entry unless the classification box is filled and put the link to a combined list of unanswered questions there. --rspuzio
Cool idea! --akrowne
So then the next question is: what is needed to implement it. One possibility is to wait for the next version of noosphere, at which time this would simply be incorpotaed into the design. However, even if all goes well and we recieve the grant, that isn't going to happen for something like two years. In that time, several hundred questions are likely to go unadressed, so a short term solution might be worth considering. I would say that if this is something which could be adressed with an outlay of $200 or less, then it is worth doing in the near future.
Since this addition I propose would be quite similar to what we already have for outstanding corrections, it would seem that code could be reused. The primary difference semms to be which interrupts trigger the module — posting to an appropriate forum (the general questions fora, the competition questions forum, and the TeX help forum) causes a link to the posting to be added to the queue and replying to a post which happens to be mentioned in the queue causes it to be removed from the queue. I assume there would also be some effort to generate a new table for outstanding questions and populate it with suitable initial content. To me, this sounds like the sort of thing that a suitably qualified person could do in half a week FTE (= 20 hrs → $200 bounty), but it would be appreciated if the sole expert on the noosphere code on the face of the planet could weigh with his opinion. -rspuzio
To make the scheme work, you should probably need a facility to classify the posting as a question, otherwise someone who posts
Subject: something dumb Content: this is funny LOL
and who doesn't get a reply because there really isn't anything to say will dominate this particular conversation. (In the simpler version, I guess someone could just say "there isn't much to say in response to that", but this seems to create a rather hefty load of "busy work", something we'd really prefer to avoid.)
--jcorneli
In principle, this could arise, but in reality it is a non-issue. While confused people will from time to time post something which is not a question to a question forum — however, that happens extremely infrequently — in the sample I surveyed last night, there were less than 1% inappropriate posts. The "rather hefty load of work" would be marking up 99% of the stuff as legitimate questions in order to guard against the 1% of neer-do-wells.
--rspuzio