Since ya'll use Discourse I don't know if this is a possible change, but it would be nice to be able to mark some replies as something other than "Solution". An example would be the topic I started here: Popup code editor moves cursor while typing - #15 by bobthebear
at one point, I had marked the reply with the workaround using VS Code as the solution to hopefully attract people who have this problem to click on it so they'd be informed of an alternative (having the same problem and seeing there's no solution could be deterring viewers, mostly ones that don't post). it was later pointed out that it was confusing since a workaround isn't technically a solution, so i removed it as the solution.
Being able to mark a reply as a "Workaround" and/or "Alternate Solution" as well as a "Solution" could help in getting readers to the information they're looking for. Some topics really do have more than one solution and being able to mark them would be useful for any reader. If I'm reading a topic and the marked solution doesn't work I won't always continue reading more replies, but maybe that's just me.
@bobthebear -- thank you for surfacing this as a feature request for our forum! I completely agree it would be ideal to have the ability to "mark as workaround" or similar. Like you mentioned, this would help with both searchability / organization, and allow us to give credit to contributors for workarounds or alternate solutions.
The way we've implemented Solutions is its own Discourse plugin scoped to just the use case of marking one solution per topic.
I've done a bit of searching around to see if there's a Discourse setting or plugin available for marking alternate solutions or workarounds and so far haven't turned up anything directly useful to fully unlock what you've outlined here.
I'll share a few leads I did find:
I was wondering if we could get creative with tags, but it doesn't appear to be possible to 'tag' a specific post, just the overall topic, so that wouldn't allow giving "credit" or marking the exact comment as the workaround. Then I came across this comment suggesting that even though you can't tag a specific post within a topic, you can bookmark posts within a topic.
I'm still not super familiar with the "bookmark" functionality in Discourse but it could be worth exploring leveraging that to mark workarounds or alternate solutions since we don't yet use Bookmarks for anything else as far as I'm aware . Visually in the UI it'd show a little ribbon on posts that are bookmarked. There's a setting to add a Bookmarks tab up top next to Latest and Top so we could see posts that have a Bookmark (which, if we did implement this for this specific purpose, could become a list of topics that have alternate solutions or workarounds, whether they also have a marked Solution or not). I don't think it's possible to filter/search on bookmarks though, and I'm not sure we could grant ToolTips (gamification points) based on bookmarks. Another possible drawback is that Bookmarks could get used for other purposes besides 'alternate solution/workaround' since anyone can bookmark anything, and the feature seems mainly designed for users to remind themselves about a post for reference later.
I also found this feature request to Discourse to allow marking multiple solutions: https://meta.discourse.org/t/ability-to-mark-multiple-correct-solutions-to-a-topic/285878 so maybe we could chime in there and advocate for that, or even create a separate Feature Request for a "Mark as Workaround" plugin/setting which I see as slightly different from marking multiple Solutions.
the bookmark idea isn't bad at all, totally outside the box although the filter/search is a bummer and not getting/giving ToolTips would mean topic creators might not care enough to both... probably making more work for yall/mods. it could be like a temp workaround until something better is figured out if a Feature Request isn't approved or something?
if yall chime in on the multipule solution topic one or make a new Feature Request def let us know so we can hop over and add our +1 !!
. Visually in the UI it'd show a little ribbon on posts that are bookmarked. There's a setting to add a Bookmarks tab up top next to Latest and Top so we could see posts that have a Bookmark (which, if we did implement this for this specific purpose, could become a list of topics that have alternate solutions or workarounds, whether they also have a marked Solution or not). I don't think it's possible to filter/search on bookmarks though, and I'm not sure we could grant ToolTips (gamification points) based on bookmarks. Another possible drawback is that Bookmarks could get used for other purposes besides 'alternate solution/workaround' since anyone can bookmark anything, and the feature seems mainly designed for users to remind themselves about a post for reference later.
!!