Should accepted answers mess up post order?

Ross

Personally I'm not a fan of posts accepted as correct answers jumping to the top of the thread. I understand the reason—this site is trying to be a combo of forum and Q&A—but this isn't a Q&A site, it's a forum. Posts jumping out of order really throws me off. All the "Question" threads I've seen so far have some sort of discussion-like progression to their posts. The "correct answers" often don't make sense without reading the posts before them.

I'm curious how other users feel about this.

I vote for keeping the posts in normal order, but highlighting the accepted post a little bit so it stands out.

Kiori

The original reason for the Q&A system was simply to have a way to mark "questions" that had been truly answered as such, vs those that hadn't. I felt that it was something nice to have, and it was part of the many features implemented to avoid using brackets, like [solved].

Yet, like you said, every single thread here, one way or another is a discussion, and that's the cool thing about having a forum. Originally I thought the bringing of the answer up was a good feature, it meant that you didn't have to scroll in order to get to the answer, but I see your point, maybe this needs some revision.

I'm curious on what others will think.

Kiori

Made some changes, check this post for an example on how it would look in a bigger discussion.

I'm 50/50 on the matter so I'll wait for everyone to chip-in.

Megalomaniak

I agree with Ross. Especially since we already have a Q&A site, though I haven't really visited there since the forum came up...

Ross

@Kiori Yeah, it makes sense, but I don't think it works in practice.

The accepted posts already have the little Answer tag thingy in the top right. If you made that the same bright blue that it is in the thread list, and maybe a bit bigger, that might be enough. That blue stands out pretty well. If you wanted to do more, tinting the post body color to a lighter, bluer color would be cool, like how the answers turn green on the Q&A site. It could be pretty darn subtle and still stand out.

It would be extra work, but maybe having a "skip to answer" button at the top of the thread that scrolls down to the answer for you would eliminate any searching. I agree it can be a pain to scroll through a thread searching for the useful bits.

Tchey

I agree, many times i read answered topics and as a noob it is sometimes not obvious to follow because of this lack of "logic flow" discussion. It is a "forum", a simple green mark or something, and a "see answer" button would work much better in my opinion.

Kiori

I thought about having a skip to answer floating button, even though I would have to figure out how to implement it in the engine. A simple link to the "answer" post would be good also, conceptually.

But what about when there is more then one answer, now it requires a hover button with position absolute, and that's not gonna do well on mobile. All in all, the entire point of not bringing the answer up was to get ppl to read the other posts to have context right, imagine if the answer is in page n.3 and you suddenly skip there... :smiley:

So for the time being I don't really see how this would be a plus, it might just lead to the same problem. I'll check out what can be done though.

Megalomaniak

Only skip to "best answer" and only allow 1 best answer. or so.

Ross

Yeah, I would just only allow 1 best answer. In my opinion a "go to answer" button would be even more useful if the thread was multiple pages, since it would save you that much more searching.

I don't think it would cause the same problem. If you click on a button that says "Go to answer", you know it's going to jump to a different place. Once you get there you can always scroll up or go back to see the context, since the post is still in the right place. Plus I'm sure that sometimes the chosen answer will have all the info you need.

Kiori

Idk, because many posts have a discussion format like everyone said, and one answers leads to another question which leads to another answer. So multiple answers are good in this context, plus many answers are complementary and only adds to the whole discussion. In that line, many discussions are not linear at all.

I think having a system where it simple skips to the first answer could work though. I'll look into it.

Tchey

I like the new system so far !

Kiori

@Tchey said: I like the new system so far !

Good to know! I'm still gonna improve it at some point. I need to do the JS so that it can become a floating button that will scroll with the page after you browse away from it, and allow 'next' "<", and 'previous' ">" answer selection while going through the thread. But for the time being all the basic functionality is there, and the code was very clean so it's all good.

Also, I don't know who noticed it, but i finally took the time to "fix" every discussion link in the discussions list leading to the "latest" comment. I found that annoying, it made it hard to read the first post. Currently, if you want the latest comment you can click on "Most recent by" shortcut in any discussion on the list, or on the recently implemented "Down Arrow", close to the discussion's name, inside the discussion proper.