Improving forum search for release
Majken Connor
please point me to the bug, otherwise, here's something I've been thinking
about.
It's really hard to find answers in the forums currently, and that's
creating something of a vicious cycle. Too many threads turn up in the
search results, so users are just starting new threads rather than finding
existing answers, which creates more threads to turn up in the search
results (and to have to answer). As I said I'm not sure if anything is
already planned to help alleviate this, but I think we should do something
before launch or the forum contributors are going to be swamped.
I was thinking that for end users, we really only want them to see forum
threads that have answers in them for a couple reasons. First of all if the
thread doesn't have an answer in it, it's not useful to the user. Secondly,
we don't want users posting on to other people's threads, we want them
creating their own, so if we don't show them unanswered threads in the first
place, it's harder for them to post on them.
Being able to only search answered threads would be really helpful to our
Live Chat contributors as well, and it would make it easier to find stuff
that needs to be added to the knowledge base.
Ideally logged in contributors would be able to search all threads still,
though I think most people would be watching older threads that they wanted
to find, or use the "threads I've posted in option" rather than needing to
search.
Jason Barnabe (np)
There's no specific request for this, but it sounds like a good idea.
Once bug 397703 is fixed ("Question answered" status for forum
threads), I'd like to see what the results for some common searches
would be. Maybe we'd want to get a few months of "answered" threads
built up before we switch users to use answered-only search. I don't
think we'd get enough data to have a good search before Firefox 3
release.
Majken Connor
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We can get a few months of answered threads any time we want, it would just
take some man hours from some volunteers who understand the criteria. The
data we need right now is how many users search the forums before posting a
question and how many of them that do manage to find an answer and how many
go on to start their own thread.
In the end though, I'm not sure what the use to the user is in search
results that include unanswered threads. If it's for the threads where a
solution is suggested but there's no response from the OP, I'm not sure how
helpful those threads would be anyway. First off, they'd most likely be
information that's either duplicated in the KB or in other answered threads,
and in the cases where they're not there's not going to be enough info in
the thread for the user to know that it's something they should try.
David Tenser
Please file a bug for it and mark it as depending on 397703.