5 replies to this topic

[markopolo2002]

I'd like to suggest something which some may find a tad unusual but bear with me and I'll explain.

At the moment, if we want to have support topics, we need to have them identical to the download content which, for me, makes me nervous regarding duplicate content and I've had ST's on the site twice now, and removed them because of this fear.   I actually used support topics for reviews, rather than for support, and used the built in download comments for, well comments - the idea being, a comment should really only be a short thing, but a review should obviously have it's own thread I reckon - but I digress ... would it be possible, and would anyone else support the idea of only creating a "support topic" when a user decides to write something?.

So, let's say a user comes along and wants to write something in the support topic - they hit the relevant button on the download page and get prompted along the lines that they are the first person to use the support topic and would they like to create it?.   Only when they populate the topic and hit submit is the support topic created.   Now, there could be options in the ACP asking the admins if a support topic is created by a user, should certain information be included, like a screenshot, the title of the download and all the other stuff it currently asks.   Or alternatively, it can just be left blank and the only thing to be included in the support topic could be the users input, apart maybe, from the title which would presumably need to be the same as the download title.

Hope everyone see's where I'm going with this, and could potentially be used for a lot of other purposes rather than just support topics?

Any supporters on this one
Cheers
Marko

[Dmacleo]

I can see uses of that, for example if you are hosting documents you may not need a topic unless someone specifically wants to discus or review it. you can't, in all cases, set it to NOT have a topic as occasionally its needed/desired. so right now it auto-generates even if its never, for that file, wanted or needed.

its basically stopping the existing topic auto-generation UNTIL someone clicks the button, then when clicking its created and opened IAW admin setting defined in ACP.

[markopolo2002]

I'm sure we could have exactly the same system in the ACP as we have now Dmacleo, with all the same options and then an additional option to only create that support topic in the circumstances I described? An extra checkbox along the lines of "only create a support topic for a download in this category when a user submits a response"

[Dmacleo]

the only thing I, with my limited sql knowledge, wonder about is if 2 people happened to hit the button at same time. who wins?
LOL
in that case I wonder if having the topic auto generated but hidden (fully hidden? ) until someone clicked button would be better?

[markopolo2002]

That is a good point, not too sure myself, but I reckon whichever user manages to hit the submit button first, with the second person's submission becoming a reply to that topic?. As I say, not sure how that would work either, probably a million to one shot, but possible nevertheless

[markopolo2002]

I eventually just edited the template for the topic creation and removed a lot of the duplicate info such as title, custom fields, etc, and reduced the length of the description feed to something like the first 300 characters of the description. It's possibly still duplicate but not quite as bad I don't reckon as it could have been