Can Mods have the ability to mark questions in certain forums as Solved inside brackets and Pending in brackets also. It's just to keep things organized.
Yes, but it could be helpful to "hard-wire" these functions in. Consider a feature where a topic that asks a solved question shows a direct link to the "best answer(s)" in a box between the OP and following posts.
That could be done -- and the functionality could be generalized and reused in other situations -- by creating "Topic Designations" (or something similar) that allow moderators to specify certain fields. So the "Topic Designation" for "SOLVED" would be:
Label in forum index: "Solved: "
Label color: #4C4Message box position: Between OP and other posts
Message box text: The question in this topic has been solved!
The best answer%IF|LINKS>1|s|% can be found %LINKS|here|, |, and %.
When applying the "SOLVED" Topic Designation, a moderator can simply add links to the best answers. Then, it would show up on the forum index like this:
Solved: Topic Title
And between the OP and other posts, people'd see a box like this:
The question in this topic has been solved!
The best answers can be found here, here, here, and here.
or this:
The question in this topic has been solved!
The best answer can be found here.
All that'd be needed would be a simple parsing engine for the box text. This functionality could be generalized or merged with existing systems to allow custom displays of messages and statuses like "This problem has been resolved!", "Topic has been locked!", etc., all using the same base functionality. Depending on how its implemented, it could also be very easily extensible.
Various attributes could be tied into this. If we take the example above and add a few features, then here's how the functionality being proposed here could be used to specify what happens to a locked topic:
Designation title: locked topic
Label on forum index? No.
Label text:
Label color:
Icon on forum index? Yes.
Icon: [image]
Show a box in the topic? Yes
Box position: Top of the page, before posts AND bottom of the page, after posts
Box text: This topic was locked by %MODERATOR% on %DATE%!\nReason: %REASON%
Custom fields
DATE: Date this designation was applied to the topic
MODERATOR: The person applying this designation
REASON: [single-line text field]
Permissions
Allow posts from these groups/ranks: none
Allow edits from these groups/ranks: moderators, administrators
Allow deletions from these groups/ranks: moderators, administrators
Allow posts in this thread to be reported by these groups/ranks: all
Show this topic in the topic list? yes
Allow this topic to be bumped? no
Keep this topic at the top of the topic list? (pin/sticky) no
So basically, I'm recommending a system where "topic designations" can be defined by people with sufficient privileges, and then applied by the same. The current system of hardcoded system messages could be replaced with an extensible system in which messages, display modes, permissions, etc., can be defined as parts of these "topic designations" and then easily applied to topics en masse. It'd be tying together multiple separate-but-similar functionalities into one extensible feature set.
This one feature set could encompass marking topics as "Solved", "Locked", "Pinned/Stickied", "Restricted", etc..
Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Aug 27 2010, 3:27 am by DavidJCobb.
None.
BlueWolf
Currently Working On: 
My terrain forum is da best.
That's exactly what I was thinking! It's a pain having to read through the debate of a thread when you're trying to figure something out. Having a link in the first post to the answer would save me so much time. Thank you so much for taking this into consideration.
