Announcement Please Help & Reply To Unanswered Threads

[Nifty-Chicken]

It's time for as many peeps as possible to "pay-it-forward" by helping out wherever they can here:

https://www.backyardchickens.com/pages/unanswered/

 

[Kiki]

I did a few!

 

[Corbdee]

Just did some!

 

[Shadrach]

I do wish we could find a way to give an auto response to many of these posts. With the best will in the world it gets tiresome answering the same questions over and over when there are perfectly adequate answers in the threads and articles.
Perhaps some work put into the search function to make it more user friendly?
I realise it's difficult to encourage people to not consider BYC a form of Siri or Alexa and of course having a person respond helps keep the forums busy etc.
I've done a couple but many are on breeds and sexing chicks and those are not something I know about or have had to care about.

 

[Shadrach]

I have a suggestion. It's a long term project and I don't know if it is possible with this forum.
Asking people to search BYC for the topic they post about doesn't seem to work very well.
Many of the common health questions for example have some excellent articles written on how one might go about resolving the problem.
Suppose the article section was reorganised so that the article groups were the same as the main forum layout.
Take the forum section "Raising Baby Chicks" for example. The articles to do with raising baby chicks could be grouped together in the articles section.
When someone posts in "Raising Baby Chicks" a bot would post a link to the article section on that topic automatically for the OP's post.

Currently that would give 11 seperate article sections with an auto bot response directing the OP to that section. This wouldn't prevent members of BYC responding to the post if they felt that they had something to add that may not be well explained in the article section but it may ease the unanswered posts and may in some circumstances provide better information than some of the responses.

 

[The Ranch Girl]

Wow such a wonderful idea! I'l help out!

 

[Shadrach]

It could be done with a pop up with this forums software I believe.

 

[Shadrach]

At it's most basic when a person hits the post button to start a new thread in any of the 11 sections a pop up would appear with a link to the relevant article section. The only way to close the pop up would be to click on the link to the article sections. This would need to be explained in the pop up box. The pop up closes after the person has visited the link.
This would at least get the OP to the relevant articles without having to use the search function which I still find difficult to use after almost five years.
Returning them to their original post might take some thought. The back button does it on my sites where the pop up doesn't auto close on a timer.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Interesting ideas!

Suppose the article section was reorganised so that the article groups were the same as the main forum layout.

Currently that would give 11 seperate article sections with an auto bot response directing the OP to that section

Organizing the LC to match the forum might help with navigation. It might get a little messy having that many sections, with a mix of some having a lot of articles and some having only a few (or none), so we'd need to evaluate that.

I'm not sure that changing the navigation alone would have much impact on the repetitive questions... I think that's just the nature of what humans do. That said, we're open to evaluating the pros/cons of the ideas!

The only way to close the pop up would be to click on the link to the article sections. This would need to be explained in the pop up box. The pop up closes after the person has visited the link.

This is another tricky balance between user-experience, optimization, etc. There are a lot of visitors that already have a hard time figuring out how/where to post (for example, the many that post their questions in the articles section), so putting in more processes and redirections might end up doing more harm than good.

Again, really interesting ideas, and worth fleshing out a bit.

 

[The Ranch Girl]

I responded to most chicken questions and duck