New Unanswered Posts function

[roddy]

To try and cut down on the number of questions that slip past unnoticed and don't get an answer, I've added an 'unanswered' link to the header. Click on it and you get a list of all posts within the last week that have not yet had any answers.

Obviously there will always be some unanswered posts - it might be an announcement so nobody needs to reply, it might be a question that nobody knows the answer to, etc, but if you are ever feeling big-hearted, click on the link and see if you can help someone out

[liuzhou]

I hope you're not expecting an answer to this!

ooops!

[venture160]

I like it! Thanks for the hard work Roddy!

[roddy]

Couple of little extras which don't really deserve their own thread.

The 'What's going on' section of the Forums listing now keeps a record of

a) The most members online in one day. Previously it would show you who had visited in the last 24 hours. It will now also tell you what the highest number of members online in one day is in recorded history, recorded history having started about half an hour ago. Highest figure is therefore the current one, 250, which is as high as I've ever seen it. You'll see a lower figure I think, as you can't see invisible members.

B) Some simple stats on guest and search engine bot activity.

PS. It's not hard work. It's what I do instead of hard work

[imron]

Perhaps you could make it disregard Yahoo! Slurp Spiders ( 1388 ), Google AdSense Spiders (2), Google Spiders (4), AltaVista Spiders (1), MSNBot Spiders (14) in the results. I think they're skewing the guest numbers somewhat

[roddy]

I think the only other option with this plug in is to have spiders included in the Guests figure, so it's probably better to have the separated out. I'm hoping there'll be some return for all those Yahoo spiders at some point - they're currently eating almost twice as much bandwidth as Googlebot and delivering about 1/20th the traffic.

[adrianlondon]

Does anyone use this feature? I clicked on it for the first time today and decided I won't do it again. It just lists any thread with no replies. It obviously has no logic to work out whether the opening post contains a question or not - that'd be too hard - but you could at least not display the classified ads which otherwise make up the bulk of the display.

However, the main issue is ... most of the questions which are worth answering are likely to be in threads where people have already had a go at it, i.e. ones with more than one post.

The solution? Either give up and remove the "unanswered" button, leave it there and forget about it, or have some sort of function whereby the thread originator can tick "this is a question" and can then tick "answered" when they feel they've got a response. Maybe it could force them to provide an email address which you then email, a month later, and say "come back and update us" or something.

Hmm. The moon is great, looks pretty and all that, but - you know, it'd be much better if I could have it on this here stick.

[zhwj]

I've used the unanswered posts function a few times - and answered in one or two cases. Apart from the classifieds, many of the posts with 0 responses can be easily answered with pointers back to earlier discussions.

I sometimes mark all messages as read after I've taken a good half hour reading a few threads, so new posts may have collected in that period of time.

It's not doing any harm sitting up there, is it? I say just leave it there (and possibly eliminate the classified category from the list).

[muyongshi]

Quick question about this: is it possible to remove the classified from the unanswered link since only admins can answer anyway? That way the posts that are really important to get answered don't get overlooked by 5 classified posts that sit there at the top for a day.

[roddy]

Originally I thought no, but I think now you could do it. Have a look at the HTML behind the advanced search form and see if you can figure out what the url should be for a direct link.

Incidentally, with the classifieds, nobody should be answering - it's for announcements rather than discussions. However, it's not possible to remove an admin users ability to post, so every now and then one of us fails to notice a post is in classifieds and imparts some of our infinite wisdom.

Also, you may sometimes notice posts listed there which do have replies. Search results are cached. That's why. Should only last an hour or so.

[muyongshi]

Wow, I guess I've been gone to long... Did you remove this function Roddy? I've been searching for it for days now and can't find it. When did this happen?

[roddy]

It's back, and it now misses out the classifeds (and indeed anything under 'extras'.)

[muyongshi]

Me like! Thanks Roddy!