Who Says Penguins Can't Fly?

On Thursday 4th February 2010, the KDE Community Forums is holding a new event called Answer Day. The event will start 00:00 UTC (ends 23:59 UTC), and everyone can participate! We’ll focus on doing the following two things:

• Answer unanswered questions

  In the forums, KDE users can ask questions and help other users. Usually you’ll get an answer pretty fast, but some questions might have been overlooked or nobody knows the answer.

  The forum has a feature to list the 1000 latest unanswered topics. Not all are questions, but you’ll find a large portion of posts waiting for answers here. So during the Answer Day, we encourage everyone to actively seek unanswered questions to answer.

  

  What to do: Click on “View unanswered posts” in the panel, browse through the list and answer as many questions as you can/want to.

• Mark topics as solved

  Before posting a question, it’s recommended that you search the forums first to see if the topic has been covered before. To make it easier to find answers, the forums have a plugin to mark topics as solved (it’s also possible to only search for solved topics).

  A solved topic will show up with a next to the title in forum view (where you see a list of topics). Clicking on the green checkmark will take you directly to the answer. In topic view (inside a topic), is shown in the title of the post with the best answer.

  Choosing the best answer is something the topic starter has to do by clicking on under the post with the solution (can be undone with). Sometimes, however, this isn’t done – maybe the topic starter didn’t know about this feature, or he/she forgot to click on the button.

• What to do: If you find a solved topic while browsing around in the forums, report the post with the answer by clicking on underneath it. Choose “The reported post does not fit into any other category, please use the further information field.” in the dropdown menu and optionally enter a comment in the text box below. Someone in the forum team will take a look at the reported post and mark the topic accordingly.

  It has to be clear that the question has been answered, for example if the topic creator has replied “Thanks for the answer, that worked perfectly”, of if you know that the answer given is 100 % correct and the only possible answer.

We hope that Answer Day will be successful and eventually become a forum tradition. What do you think about this event, and forum activities in general? Suggestions and feedback are always appreciated.