The Julia discourse has a Solved marker. When a post/question is solved by a reply, the owner of the post can mark the reply as Solved. The marked reply will be shown right below the post’s original content, and the post will also be marked as solved. This allows people to easily identify which posts/questions are solved and find the solutions. Stack Overflow also has this feature. See an example as follows:
Can we add this feature to Fortran discourse?
The solved marker is provided by this plugin:
Looks like a useful addition to me. @lkedward @milancurcic @certik What do you think?
We already have the plugin available. I enabled it for all threads in the #help category now.
Let me know if this works for you or whether we should enable it for more categories.
I just tried with an old post and it works:
I don’t know if we can choose only one solution or several.
Thanks for doing that. The Solved marker can be applied to all categories. That’s what Julia discourse has been doing for a long time and has worked well. In addition, I believe it makes sense to require the specification of category when one posts a thread in Fortran discourse. There are too many uncategorized threads here.
Also, I think we should ask the users to check their old threads to see if there is any reply to mark as Solved. I already did that. That will improve the reusability of the solutions in the threads.
This is a good idea and thank @awvwgk for making it available.
Meanwhile, I wish that nobody will aim to compete for her/his post to be selected/voted as “the best solution”. I appreciate that we share views and opinions here, more like brainstorms than competitions. In contrast, people have competitions on forums like StackOverflow, and consequently, the atmosphere becomes not so friendly sometimes. The environment here is much healthier, where we exchange ideas and support each other as a community.
I also worry about exactly the same thing.
It is a valid concern. I think it is a beneficial feature as long as not overused, therefore I wouldn’t make a big announcement out of this to have all users revisit their old threads to select solutions. Best is to observe how it affects the threads in #help category.
A big plus in Discourse is that we don’t have a score that is always next to the user name. The number of accepted solutions will appear on each user profile page, however it doesn’t grant anything, since the user trust levels (Discourse’s reputation system) are mainly based on read time.
I have tested it on my Help posts. One problem is that only one post can be considered as The solution, although there is often two or three posts that give different valid and helpful answers.
Agree. That is what I meant by “share views and opinions”, “exchange ideas”, and “support each other”.
This sounds like a feature request for the plugin. There are already some thread about this
Let’s see how it works in the help category. Let’s reevaluate in a few weeks and If it is actually counter productive, then let’s remove it.
I don’t think this is a justifiable concern. Discourses are very different from Stack Overflow. I have seen people showing their Stack Overflow reputation points and badges on their personal websites, but haven’t seen anything similar for Discourses. Julia and Rust discourses have been using Solved marker for a long time, and there haven’t been any issues. If there is no Solved marker, it will be very time-consuming to search and browse all related threads and all replies to find the solution, resulting in people asking the same questions again and again.
Moreover, Fortran is much less faddy and hyped than Julia and Rust, which means we are simply problem-solving oriented and won’t start a drama like this one:
I think it is definitely a justifiable concern, but whether the concern turns true is another matter.
For example I noticed you accepted my answer here as the solution:
Two questions about stdlib - #3 by certik
Which I am of course happy about as a person, but you can see that @milancurcic also provided a valuable piece of answer that I did not mention. And so in that case, the answer is really both of those comments. So I do feel it might be discouraging.
Anyway, as I said, let’s try it and see.
Do we have a “Discussion” category? That is close to what “discourse” originally means, right?
There are many topics hard to be categorized as help/announcement/meta. Sometimes we simply want to share views and ask for opinions. The discussions may be open-ended with no “solutions”.