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Email notification and "selected answer" issue

Hi!

I posted a question and got a quick and very good answer on the forum.

I liked the email notification when there was an answer on my question. And with a direct link to the question/answer.:)

I also chose the "selected answer" button and confermed. I think this is a good thing. But I was confused when everything then was repeated in the post when I selected answer. Another thing that came to my mind is that a question might be answered but still not solved. How can we know if a question is solved or not? When looking for solutions on a problem it would be good to know which ones that have been solved, I think.

And for the record, I think TeachExcel and this forum is awesome.

Replies

Glad you like it! I think it has the potential to be better than other forum software but of course it's not perfect :P.

As for the Answer thing, this is what I was thinking with the current design: in the list of questions, there is a part where it says how many Replies were gotten and that counts how many "answers" were submitted. To the left of that it says "No Answer" if an answer has not been selected as the correct answer or "Answered" if one has been selected as the correct answer.

I am struggling with the best way to show this because sometimes, as happened with a couple questions already, there is a correct answer for the question but the user doesn't come back and select the answer. So, I want people to know that Answers exist for the question. But, other times, there can be many replies but none of them actually solve the problem.

Maybe a better way is to change "Replies" in the Question listing page to "Answers" and then change "No Answer" to "No Answer Selected" and "Answered" to "Answer Selected".

Or Just change Replies to Answers and remove the Answered/No Answer part.

I'm not sure what I will do but I want it to be as clear as possible so let me know your thoughts on that.

And, for selecting an answer to your question, did you mean how the answer then appears twice on the page? I figured that that would be nice if there are lots of answers that might be voted higher up (the answers section is sorted by number of votes each answer gets) but the actual selected answer should be clearly visible at the top. It does seem odd when there aren't that many answers on the page though.

Do you think it would be better to remove the separate "answer section" and just highlight the answer within the list of answers but make sure it appears at the top of the list but with a grey background so it's still easy to identify the selected answer? (that may sound a little confusing :/)

Don.

I think your suggestions above are good ways of solving these clarity issues - personally i think it needs to show how many answers have been given for a questions and then if the question has been satisfactorily answered or not and then to simply highlight the correct answer somehow within the post rather than repeating it.

Then again I'm not a website builder, i don't know what is & isn't possible and don't want to tell you what to do. As far as I'm concerned, as long as I can still get your excel tuition, training and answers then I'll be happy

Thanks for your input!

Basically anything is possible, my goal is simply to make it easier for people to understand and follow and learn.

I made the changes to where the questions are listed and added an additional filter to the page to make it easier to find questions with answers or without, including when they haven't been selected.

Today, I will update how Answers are shown so they aren't repeated on the page.



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