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MSDN Forums Answer Marking

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One of the major community channels we have been working on in the DDCPX team is the new MSDN Forums.  Our forums have been very successful so far (over 1,500 confirmed answers last week alone!) and one of the reasons is our "answer marking" ability.  Whenever a user posts a thread to the forums, they must select whether it is a comment or a question.  If it is a question, every reply to the question is potentially an answer.  This is where "answer marking" comes in.

The "Mark as Answer" button is visible on every reply to a question thread if:

1.)  You are a moderator or "trusted answer tagger" on the forums or;
2.)  You are the original question asker for that thread.

A button appears in the title bar of each reply to a question thread, with the text "Mark as Answer".  If clicked, the thread is marked as answered, and the answer is highlighted.

Currently, we only allow moderators, Microsoft employees, and a few others to mark replies as answers.  This is because this is a trusted group of people that has demonstrated that they have a great deal of comprehension about the subject matter, and definitely know what is and is not an answer.

The interesting question is:  what would happen if we allowed everyone to mark answers?  Do you believe people would mark the wrong answers sometimes?  Would it get out of control, or would it actually greatly help the number of answers that were marked?  It's something we are thinking about--from some random non-scientific spot checks of the forums, about 30% of the "unanswered" questions are actually answered questions that have never been marked.  How do we fix this?

I'd love to hear your opinion, and we are into "dogfooding" what we make--so instead of the comments section this time, why not head over to the forums and post a reply to the thread I started over there?  Hope to see you there!

https://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=149920&SiteID=1

Joe Morel

Program Manager

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2005
    There's already the "Was this post helpful ?" button.

    It's not quite the same as what you suggest. If there was such answer tagging button for everyone, it should be thoughtfully implemented. For example so that it would require atleast,say, 3 non-MS persons to push it before the "answer tag" would be visible to everyone. Of course there could be some fancy system where after you've done enough of these 3/3 validated answers you would get some sort of expert status in the particular forum (example: DirectShow) which will more promptly give your answers the "ultimate" answer tag.

    Alternatively, question submitters could be required to (after one reply is in) tag the replies to the question as non-answers. If they do not come and tag the replies as non-answers, the replies move to pending status after a few days and then a third party (other than one who replied or submitted question) could with one click mark what (s)he thinks is the answer. But before this few days have passed, only the question submitter could tag reply as answer - he should be auto notified by email and messenger about new replies to his question.
  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    The "Was it Helpful" button typically isn't used, mainly because people don't really know where that data goes. (We use it for search rankings and collect it here internally to find the "most helpful" posters.)

    Your idea about a "fancy system" requiring a few validated answers from a user before they become a trusted answer tagger is really good.

    How about this: everyone gets the rights to mark answers to every reply EXCEPT their own, and once they answer five questions, they can mark anything?
  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2005
    Through some conversations with the forums team, it looks like we are going to try to shoot for the "fancy" system, giving everyone answer marking privileges for everyone but themselves initially, and full answer marking privileges after they've contributed five answers.

    Scott--"dogfooding" is a term used alot here at Microsoft that means "using stuff we build before it's ready to release to customers". This means that we are actively testing and using the same products as our customers so we understand the pain points around the product. For example--many people in the Windows org use daily builds of Vista in their day-to-day work. This allows them to see where Vista needs to be improved in a more customer-centric manner than simple testing would.
  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2009
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