Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down

Everybody's doing it! You should put in a system to emulate Yahoo Answers with 'helpful/not helpful' buttons and enough of them will mark a thread with some sort of 'solution found' flag. People searching could then find answers to their searches without going into unresolved threads that still don't have any definite solution.

I don't usually look at the thumbs personally, but what do others think?

I don't really think it's necessary for a small forum like this.

Voting is generally good for sorting content. With a handful of posts a day there is very little need, and participation would probably be minimal.

I think we'd suffer from helpful button fatigue. How often, really, does a person (besides me, of course) post something that isn't helpful?

The in-forum search ranks posts in the order of the number of views they have had. This is supposed to be a rough guide, because more helpful posts tend to get more views.

Impressive. Spam in the signature, what will they come up with next?

I don't think it's as much a matter of being helpful or not, but more like a way for people to say, "Yes, this thread is just what I needed to actually solve my problem."

After all, exactly HOW many "how do I make multiline triggers work" threads ARE there? And similar stuff also. Maybe I'm feeding laziness in actually searching the forum for something that might already be here, but it may help in cutting down on redundant information.

Actually, it might be useful to have a wiki instead, where these kinds of things can be organized more easily and described in detail. If it's deemed to be a good idea, I'm willing to help moderate the wiki (and I have plenty of field experience, as the first "bureaucrat"-rank editor of the RuneScape Wiki).

I think that could be quite handy. I try to do that to a certain extent by referring to "more useful" threads at the top of various forum sections.

The forum already has provision for wiki-style entries. See here:

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?bbtopic_id=115

All that would be needed would be to create a new section for MUSHclient "helpful stuff".

The "wiki index" feature might need modifying slightly but apart from that we should be good to go.

And if you want to start collating stuff Twisol that would be helpful.

Alternatively to the existing forum, I could install something like the Wikipedia-style wiki (where you get diffs, and can revert stuff and so on) which would be more powerful. I don't know whether that would be unleashing a monster or not.

Hmmmm! I never knew the forum had a wiki mode. I'm not sure about the organizational benefits, though; the first thing you see is a list of threads (actually, kind of like the "Recent Changes" page on Wikipedia), and the index provided - while adequate for SMAUG-related topics - might not work too well for something with such diverse topics as MUSHclient.

I actually was thinking of MediaWiki (the Wikipedia engine) when I wrote my post, and I do think it would be a good option.