How Much I Know - HTML Forums

Thirsty Ferret · 05-17-2008, 03:42 PM

I was answering a question to do with htaccess earlier on, and I was struggling to answer it at a level I thought appropriate to the user - they said they were new to the forum, but from what they said it seemed like they knew a little on the subject already.

So, to my point. Partly inspired by the Dreamhost.com customer feedback forms (if any of you is a customer there then you'll know what I mean by this), would it be a good idea / possible to have a drop-down with each new thread for the user who is asking the question to assign a value for how much they know on the subject area? For example could be a range from "1: I am completely new" to "5: I'm an expert" kind of thing. Then, users giving solutions will know at what level to pitch their answer.

Obviously, there may be a difference between what the user thinks they know and what they actually know, but at least with this they can give some sort of indication of where they are with the subject.

Just pitching it in for consideration

Horus_Kol · 05-17-2008, 11:00 PM

that sounds like a pretty good idea - let's see what some of the others think, and see if Scoutt reckons we can implement it...

rangana · 05-17-2008, 11:54 PM

That's indeed a good one

...I would agree on that idea

Pegasus · 05-18-2008, 12:03 AM

It's a good idea, but given that we already have a few things we'd like people to do when they post, I'm not sure that they'd check/remember to post just how much they know.

I'll talk it over with Scoutt and we'll see what we can come up with.

Thirsty Ferret · 05-18-2008, 02:12 AM

Thanks for the positive response guys

I agree the "getting people to actually do it" may be a problem, but it could be done in such a way that it's set as "Choose one..." (or something) by default and then the user is alerted via javascript if they try to submit a thread without changing it?

Could also include a "Not relevant" for posts which don't require such a feature.

scoutt · 05-20-2008, 10:22 PM

well, I don't think it is a bad idea bu that is what forums are for, either you know about the subject or you don't. As far as the poster giving a rating to how much they know abut the subject is up to them. For example, maybe the don't know jack about the subject but in this subject they know how to fix it. So they would say they are a newbie but give the correct answer.

That is what the reputation points are for. If the poster is asking a question that is out of your league then you wouldn't be answering it, would you? And the fact the user is asking the question mans they don't know the answer about the subject.

I like the thought just not sure if it fits in a forum type setting.

Thirsty Ferret · 05-21-2008, 02:28 AM

Yeah I see your point. This is the post that originally got me started about the idea because (to me at least) it seems like he knows something about Htaccess but doesn't know details, but I couldn't be sure. This is the ambiguity I was looking to resolve with the suggested feature

http://www.htmlforums.com/software-a...ps-103457.html

In this context, I wasn't sure whether I could just say, "sure, here's what you add to your .htaccess" or whether I needed to say that it has to be in a certain place or how to actually make a .htaccess, which was why my answer was so broad and hopefully not patronising if he did know about it!