Shoutbox

I don't agree with this... at least not as suggested...

There are already problems with these [REQUEST], [BUG], [BETA], [RELEASE], etc things which people put in front of their thread titles.

Don't get me wrong, they would be very usefull IF used properly. However I see many threads with [BUG] which aren't a bug, [RELEASE] and [BETA] are used waaaay to often and is quite often the only thing which makes two threads about the same plugin/script different as the contents is exactly the same (or rather, contents is copied, questions are repeated, etc)

All those things are very good if they are used properly and can only be set by people who know why and when to put them (eg: mods). It does not work when everybody can simply set such things. In fact they create more confussion than anything else...

I see the very same happening for this [SOLVED] thing. It would be far from rare that people think they have solved something, while in fact they didn't or a solution which was given doesn't even work or whatever.

Another example would be a thread where a user has asked a question it has been solved, the tag is added, and the user experiences a problem with that solution. In that case the tag should be removed again (I don't see that happening all the time... in the beginning sure, but seeing that people also don't report double posts/threads etc, but rather only post to the OP about it, I don't see this happening either).

Also, since the thread has the tag, people will ignore the thread and the OP's followup question will never be answered.

What it also will encourage, imo, (willing or not) is people jumping from thread to thread quickly to try and get as many as possible [SOLVED] icons, while in fact they don't help at all or dont give complete detailed support...

Also, if such tags are been implemented, they should only be set by mods or something, imo. Or work like the half-sticky threads (and although very rare, even there there are some questionable half-sticky threads).




In short: the suggestion is extremely nice and usefull... in theory... in practice there are a lot of disadvantages too.