That’s great, a “Solved” button is better than nothing, but forcing a “Solved” when a topic isn’t a black and white linear issue can cause frustration. For instance, one of my topics is on the pros/cons of using a Surface Pro 3 for SketchUp. I’ve received satisfactory answers, but I definitely welcome more. There is no measurable “right” answer, but the topic is a question, a request for assistance. I believe most topics fall into that category.
Also, SketchUp isn’t like other programs. It’s flexible, with many ways to accomplish one objective. For example, I once counted 16 ways to make a box in SketchUp which didn’t involve redundant actions. So it’s unlikely that every topic will have one satisfactory answer, or always have one answer which is better than the others. My recent Feature Request post about a tool to more easily move objects through space yielded a half a dozen acceptable solutions, without having one “right” answer. If just one of those helpful suggestions got a Badge for having the “right” answer, it would insult the other equally valid solutions people gave, and could end up becoming an irritation, a false and unfair competition, a unjustifiably zero-sum game. This is a qualitative subject, not a quantitative one.
For that reason, voting replies up and down would be WAY more helpful than forcing a false attribute of “one correct answer per topic.”
Also, this matter is actually two separate issues. One is on a topic level: advertising if a topic welcomes more contributions, or if it would be a waste of time for someone to pitch in. The second issue is inside the topic thread, assigning values to the helpfulness of the replies. These issues need to be treated as separate issues, and they are being addressed in the “Solved Button Plugin” solution as if they are one problem with one solution.
Again I repeat, having at least three, maybe four, top/topic-level attributes, for Resolved, Mostly Satisfied, Partly Satisfied/In Discussion, and Unaddressed, would be more accurate and less frustrating than forcing a yes/no dichotomy. Allowing posters to bump their topic up by hitting a “I still need help with this topic” button (just visible to topic authors) might be nice, and would allow old questions that the poster no longer cares about to settle to the bottom of the topic list (maybe they eventually found a solution on their own, after all). And for the second issue, having votings for helpful replies inside topics would much more accurately reflect the reality of SketchUp, in that often it takes a village to contribute a satisfying answer(s).
So pretty much, I would love to see this be like stackoverflow.com, except with more hints as to how much more help is desired per topic. I wish I could suggest the programming to make this happen, but I’m all front-end UI Design, sorry.
