Make Marking a Post as [SOLVED] a Tickable Box

[LastUnicorn]

Forum website is by and large pretty good. However, things could be improved if posters could, instead of marking (by entering text) a topic as "[SOLVED]" that 'solved' label could be applied by just setting up a button attached to each post whereby the poster can just tick a box and the topic will automatically be displayed in the forum listing as 'solved'.

As things stand just now if a topic is marked as solved (by textual means) then when it is displayed in the forum listing that solved topic is shown with a large green tick mark displayed. So really there isn't any real need for the string "[SOLVED]" to be included in the post subject. However, managing things in this way would put a onus on the webmasters to ensure that the information that a large green tick next to a topic does mean 'Solved' was readily known to users of the forum (which with a little bit of will wouldn't be an impossible thing to arrange).

Also doing things in this way gets around the problem where a user posts a topic and uses all, or nearly all, of the maximum allowed text string to write what that topic is in the first place. How does such a poster manage to mark, by textual means, their topic as [SOLVED] if they can't actually enter that due to string length limits?

Hope my suggestion mets with approval.

EDIT: My suggestion is in fact partially implemented already so there is already a 'solution' to this suggestion. See my second post in this thread for details.

[acknak]

Good idea! Unfortunately, we have no control over the internals of the forum. It "comes from the factory" with a lot of configuration options which are straightforward enough, but changes beyond that would require some serious programming/customization work and skilled labor to make changes is in short supply.

If you want to pursue the idea, the phpBB support forum may have some suggestions (maybe there's an option I'm not aware of): http://www.phpbb.com/support

PS: You can submit requests for enhancement on the Apache OO bug tracker: [Tutorial] Reporting bugs or suggestions

[LastUnicorn]

Thanks for the response acknak.

I just noticed myself that posters actually are to some extent in control of this already. There are actually 'radio buttons' where one can put a dot in the one which puts the 'green tick mark icon' in place. (This radio button is at at the top of the text edit box when you are editing your post. The radio buttons are titled "Post Icon".) Then, if the user doesn't want to mark the topic as [SOLVED] via textual means then they can just skip that out. (Of course this will lead to inconsistency if users do different things - but, from my point of view at least the option is there.)

(Prior to making this post I was under the illusion that the Green Tick icon only appeared in a forum listing because the listing was scanning the post Subject text and, if it found the string [SOLVED] in the post Subject then the listing would automatically arrange for the Green Tick icon to show next to the post Subject. Nope, doesn't work like that at all. Should open my eyes a bit more.)

On that basis I've marked this post as solved but only by using the green tick mark icon.

[acknak]

Nope. The post marking is entirely manual. The [SOLVED] marking is helpful for scanning a list of posts to see which ones are not yet resolved. The icon is not as easy to see.

[Hagar Delest]

On that basis I've marked this post as solved but only by using the green tick mark icon.

The advantage of adding the "Solved" string in the topic title (first post) is that it allows users to search for solved threads directly (as a keyword in the query).