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A few stickies at the top with popular questions?

Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2015 5:22 pm
by John_Ha
Would it be worth while to have a few stickies at the top of the forum which people would see and hopefully read before posting the same question yet again, and volunteers answering it yet again?

The stickies could be chosen by looking at the number of views a posting has had - I can think of [Solved] Spell check underlines every word (20,000 hits); [Solved] Replacing Quotation marks? (11,000); [Hint] How did I fix my ODT file (97,000); Recovering overwritten file! Help! (4,000); Guidance needed to open PDF's in OpenOffice.org (67,000); [Solved] Spellcheck not working??

The posts could be tidied up with the consolidated answer placed at the beginning. The subject might need adjusting too.

Or are they best in Tutorials, in which case responders should be encouraged to point to them.

Re: A few stickies at the top with popular questions?

Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2015 6:48 pm
by acknak
[Moved to public forum, no need to discuss privately.]

Re: A few stickies at the top with popular questions?

Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2015 9:47 pm
by RusselB
Excellent idea.
I will support this.

Re: A few stickies at the top with popular questions?

Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2015 6:36 pm
by MTP
I don't see any reason why not. Looking at the boards now, the tutorial forums are obvious to me, but I think I'd been reading for six months or something before I found them. Maybe because other forums I've used haven't had tutorials pages such a thing wasn't even on my radar? It might be nice to have the stickies as well, and I would speculate that since stickies are such a common feature across forums that users would find them more easily.

Re: A few stickies at the top with popular questions?

Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2015 8:53 pm
by MrProgrammer
The Mac OS X forum could use two sticky topics: For "Reopen Windows" and for "Gatekeeper won't let me install". Based on the number of times people have asked about the former issue, I'd support an entire page of sticky topics for it, since these clowns apparently can't see that a dozen people have asked the exact same question in the past week!

In many cases a sticky FAQ topic could simply point to the relevant tutorials.

I'm sure I can identify some very common Calc questions. Stickly topics for [Tutorial] Ten concepts that every Calc user should know and [Tutorial] VLOOKUP questions and answers, each with more than 75000 views, might help Calc beginners. The former attempts to address many points that confuse people who are not familiar with spreadsheets. My intent was that if we can get people to read Ten Concepts, hundreds of topics about those subjects could be avoided. I've answered many topics by just providing a tutorial link for Ten Concepts, VLOOKUP, or [Tutorial] Text to Columns and I often don't hear anything further from the OP in which case I presume that the topic is [Solved] even if they don't mark it as such.