Hello,
Two plugins that could be useful on the forum:
To highlight a “solution” in a thread:
To let us express ourselves with not only a 
but some different reactions like 
and 
To be honest, it might seem like a good idea on paper, but judging by what I have seen on some forums like on Evernote forums and some of the Microsoft forums, where they tried something similar… what looks like a good idea on paper, ends up being problematic in reality. At least in my experience.
On Evernote forum they had up and down vote for answers and for feature requests. What happened was that pretty soon everyone started to ignore it and than they got anyone that instead of more human interactions they got more “traffic signs” as they call it. You know, like when governments start putting traffic signs every 2 m before you arrive somewhere and at some point you just tune out and find them annoying or ignore them. And you start paying attention to other drivers instead.
That’s what happened on forums with these signs. People didn’t come to forums for more signs and emoji, they can for human interactions. In the end these types of signs for ignored or people complained about them. I think its because people are so bombarded by these little icons and interaction buttons on their phones on social media etc. That they really just want to chat with real people in the most straightforward way possible. The less distractions and fancy graphics the better.
At least that was my experience.
As for “highlighted solved or answered” post. I’ve seen that on Microsoft and Adobe forums and one of the things I’ve noticed is that its often a kiss of death for a threat. People go to the thread, see the big green “solved” or “answered” sign and assume no one cares anymore and even when they have useful information to contribute, that is a big turn down. What’s the point of posting anything more than one answer, and its not always correct one was labeled by moderators or someone as only one that matters. So people don’t even bother posting anymore. This can lead to problems over time, because sometimes better or different solution to same problem exists and where people might post about it, now they just don’t anymore.
Those were my experiences with it. It had the opposite effect of intended.
3 Likes
Absolutely. There is (usually) quite a high level of discussion on these forums. Adding grunts and sighs will not improve the conversation, may make it worse. Simplicity is beautiful.
The Solved marker might be useful, but as @MSmithy points out, PhotoLab is an artist’s tool, and there’s often more than one solution to most problems, some better, some worse. An early solved might kill useful discussion. Most of us would check the solution anyway and chime in. I would hate though to see this forum go in the StackOverflow (same creators as Discourse, Jeff Atwood) direction, with points and comments on comments though.
What I would like back are higher quality and larger images again. These are important for the integrity of the work and demos. My own images were massacred on a how-to thread, forcing me to create a zip file and upload it to Proton Drive and link it here, if I want other photographers to see what I saw when creating the tutorial examples. This does not mean that the forum has to leave jpegs at full size. I use ImageOptim before uploading my images, which is an almost lossless way to shed about 80% of the bulk of an image, but it looks the same to the human eye. The forum could run a similar routine with uploaded images to save both disk space and bandwidth.