Doesn’t this imply that somehow there are more questions asked (threads started) by SU team members and sages than threads started by other OPs? Cannot only OPs tag best answers with “solution”?
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Well, I guess that is a plausible implication, but it was not my intent. I thought that Sages and SU Team Members could indicate solutions as well as the OP (since the departure of the Community Manager). Can anybody offer some clarity on this?
I think only the OP and admins can.
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Yeah…that makes sense. I guess I must be remembering a solution indicated in response to a query where I was the original poster and not responding as a Sage. Thx for the heads up.
I’m totally with Dan on this. I’ve been reading through both the Sketchucation and the Sketchup Forums for a long time. (And many other unrelated forums). There have been so many threads I’ve encountered that span over years, and there’s nothing wrong with them. When searching through the (not so friendly) google groups, or going through apple support groups for example, there is nothing more frustrating than to reach a thread about a burning relevant question, only to find that the thread is closed to further comments… almost answering the burning question, but Not Quite (or not at all)!
A simple reply is all one asks for, but then… no! Thread closed.
Then one must spend an hour (or more) reviving the essence of that thread into a new thread, confusing one self, and all the following searchers / readers who will find themselves bouncing between multiple threads in search of an answer to their questions.
Auto closing a thread sounds wrong to me. Maybe close threads that have been marked as 100% answered or something like that. And even that doesn’t mean they are ever 100% answered. There will always be someone with a relevant question that doesn’t necessarily require a new thread.
Keep it up to the Forum mangers, Sketchup Sages, or what ever Label the “Gods of Forums” 
use, to decide if something is off topic, irrelevant etc… have stricter rules for posting or something like that… if that’s the problem…
Good Day,
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I use the forum infrequently primarily because I am confused by it. There doesn’t seem to be a good way to search for topics. So then I am guilty of creating a new post. It is my opinion that there are no irrelevant topics for new users. A clearly explained search procedure would likely see these topics re-visited.
I’ll give it a go:
- Click the
icon at the top right (on the forum toolbar.) - Type some search term into the box …
- Watch the “hits” appear magically.
- Click a search hit, (or right-click and open in new tab)
- If none of the “hits” in this concise popup list looks like what you want,
click the “show more V” link at the bottom of the list, and you’ll get a full search results page.
You can also just navigate to:
http://forums.sketchup.com/search
and type in the search box.
(You can also use the “Advanced” button to expand the form to an advanced search form.)
If you want to search a specific category, you just enter "category:Catname "
at the beginning of the search box.
So for example: “category:Extensions vray” results in:
https://forums.sketchup.com/search?q=category%3AExtensions%20vray
The same holds for searching a specific user’s posts, you’d use a “user:” term
in the search box, example: “user:tt_su API debugging”:
https://forums.sketchup.com/search?q=user%3Att_su%20API%20debugging
Or search by “tag:” or “tags:”, for example searching for topics
labeled as a “bug” in all categories would be “tag:bug”:
https://forums.sketchup.com/search?q=tag%3Abug
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Searching for topics in advanced mode or for specific issues requires that you have already reached a certain point of understanding of SketchUp’s terminology. Most of the time , new users don’t have a clue what to search for. There is a whole (new) generation that doesn’t take effort in learning even the basic principles. They want answers, and they want them quick. They don’t bother searching. Perhaps a tagging system could automatically link topic’s to page’s with solutions. If they have 'clicked ’ on these links and got the answer the (automated) reply would be " Hey, I’ve clicked on these links and it solved my issues ! "The topic would get solved automatically. If the OP still hasn’t found what it was looking for, he could remove the automated message and the topic would be still editable. Searching for solved topic’s should be on top of the search-results
Cultures are based upon what our predecessors already have built and accomplished. Don’t throw away the building blocks!
Thanks Dan I will give it a go when I can get back to it.
When typing a new post you already get search results that matches what you are writing. I think the forum system already does a lot to help people here.
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I think that’s fair enough. We have a satisfactory mix here.
[quote=“eneroth3, post:30, topic:40562, full:true”]
When typing a new post you already get search results that matches what you are writing. I think the forum system already does a lot to help people here.
[/quote]I totally agree with @eneroth3 , even if users can’t find search button ‘for some reason’, that feature corners them! 
Or enter my user name and attempt order and then taken to advanced search and have to take time now to fill out another form. Who designs should be forced to use for awhile.
In my pass role as level three staff engineer I would not approve any application that waste so much of staffs time. Don’t point me toward someones help write up, I find they are mostly non-intutive and also waste time.
Or I get emails that do not have any meaningful title so I just skip
forcing users to new threads often with same issues only because a thread feels old (3 month… really?) is surely no good idea especially with most people not getting bothered by this.
Reminds me at the old forum and Google groups repeatedly being closed and nuked with all the valuable knowledge mainly created by volunteers went down the drain:
but hey, was only ol’ stuff 
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Almost very program I’ve worked on the question usually comes up how one captures knowledge base. This is almost like intellectual property and should be worth $$ to Trimble, Google, etc. but may there here are some leagl reasons it does not get done or does it?
I can not think of a real technical reason for not except for leader ship commitment ?
And here is another type of topic (feature request) that should not ever be automatically closed. Only manually closed if the feature is actually added to the application.
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Restating these thoughts from the “Auto close wiki” thread.
Users with high privileges (sages, etc.,) should be able to switch off auto-close if they are creating a perpetual discussion or help thread (and do not intend that there ever be a post marked as a solution.)
OR
Auto Close should only apply to solved threads.
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Apparently, the Close feature does NOT affect the ability to edit existing posts in any closed thread:
Jeff Attwood (co-founder) in Discourse support: Best practices for archiving topics, says:
Close only prevents new replies.
and
Archive freezes a topic in carbonite so nothing about it can ever change. Ever.
This is not happening. Ie, the counter is not resetting when new posts are adding to long running threads.
For example, this thread has only a month of life left in it, despite all it’s activity.
Would it be possible to close the topics after a set period of inactivity? I think that would be better than an artificial time limit with a counter starting at the thread’s creation. The inactivity setting could even be shorter than the three months life now allowed for a thread.
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