Hi,
I don't think we had a formal discussion about this. We've noticed questions with [solved] in the summary recently.
There are two scenarios when this is being used: - the question was answered properly, and the answer did actually help - the person did something like a reinstall, and the question isn't pertinent any more (the poster doesn't need it anymore, so he just adds [solved] and moves on.)
We can always close questions with the "answer was accepted" solution, but I'm not for using that. More answers can always be given, and answers can always be improved.
Here's the first proposal:
- Add "Please do not add the [Solved] keyword to your question summaries. If you received an answer that solved the issue, please mark the answer as correct and reward the helper with karma." to the user guidelines.
Now, the addition of the term "solved" somewhere in the question does help in a way: it helps improve search results, say google/bing/whatever (This is based on my basic understanding of SEO etc, please correct me if I'm mistaken). So, an additional proposal:
- Mods add a "solved" tag to questions that they feel are properly answered, and the answer was accepted, just to ensure that search engines associate the term with the question.
This will ensure that the second case mentioned earlier doesn't occur and improve search results too.
google search -> "site:ask.fedoraproject.org create desktop shortcuts solved"
Now, I do see that stack exchange doesn't do this sort of thing at all, so proposal 2 might not be required at all.
Also, since we're now using instances for languages, shouldn't we have a set of guildelines for moderators, if we don't already? To ensure that everyone follows the same system etc.? I still need to talk to the Spanish mods about the use of the "user group" functionality. Should I ask them to join the infra ML, or is there a simpler way of speaking to all mods? Considering that we do all our discussion here, maybe they should be required to join the infra list? I think a separate ML for mods would be overkill.
Comments?