Support/ForumRedesignPRD: Difference between revisions

** Check with devs on feasibility.  P3 if easily possible.

* Language auto detection (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/)

** When someone posts in a non-English language, an automatic notification could appear notifying the user that he/she will have a greater chance of getting a response if he/she posts in English -- can't we point instead to the appropriate local forum if we know it?

** Ability for contributors to see only questions asked in their own language

** Auto-translation of non-mother-tongue questions? E.g. if a contributor speaks English and Swedish, and a forum question is asked in French, auto-translate that French question on the fly and allow the contributor to answer in English or Swedish and auto-translate back to French again. Obviously notify contributor of the process and warn about degradation of language.

* In the AAQ form, ask for the computer skill level on a scale of 1-x. This can then be used to segment our users ("what's the most common problem for new users of Firefox?") and allow contributors to focus on the type of questions they are most interested in (beginner/advanced).

* Look at how Aardvark solved the "Was this helpful?" questions for some inspiration; they provide three responses: Yes; Kind of, but not for me; and No. This sends a clear message to users: a post can be helpful even if it's not solving the problem for yourself. (Added this because of our recent discussion where Cheng didn't want an ability to downvote an answer because people will misuse it and think it's a No if the answer doesn't solve the problem. In this case, "Kind of, but not for me" would be the response in those situations.)

** (P1?) ''I actually didn't want a downvote because people will whine about perfectly good solutions if it's not the kind of answer they're looking for like "use this extension instead" if they want that feature baked into Firefox or "talk to X third party"'' I'm not sure how this addresses that but I think it's a good idea anyway. -- P1 because it refines an existing P1.

* Aardvark also allows commenting on answers, which is another thing we discussed. They present each answer on the same page, and then the comments under each answer. For really long discussions under a particular answer, we could use clever overflow with an expander to load the full discussion in its own page.

* Send an e-mail notification immediately when posting a question to thank the user for using the forum and inform about the fact that we're community-based to set the right expectations.  

* Send an e-mail reminder to the OP after x days of no response after an answer was provided in the posted thread, to encourage the user to confirm whether the problem was solved or not.

** (P2)

** Give the user an opportunity to provide more information about the problem. When this info is provided, the thread should be bumped up as if it was newly created and as such more easily discoverable by the community.

** ''I like the motivation behind this idea -- help people get better answers by having them provide more info -- but I think an alternate way of having the same effect that feels less spammy is a combo of two things:''

==Usecases==