Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : RE: Guys, what do you think about this...?

I always appreciate it when I get feedback on a good answer.

More than that, though, I think people are discouraged from searching because there are so many matches to most common questions that the thought of looking at them all is daunting, and the majority of postings are non-helpful (unless you consider it helpful to just know that someone else is having the same problem). And a post that says "thanks, that worked!" is unlikely to appear in the search results unless the subject line contains hits on the search terms that would lead the searcher to read the thread anyway.

Part of this can be addressed by improved searching skills, but that's an individual action item. Often, it's difficult to find the answer to a question without having some inkling what the answer will be. (I don't know how to do this, but it's almost got to involve a NotesUIDocument -- let's throw that into the query and see whether that narrows it down much). For this type of searching to be successful, it helps if the post with the answer contains enough of the question words to match a search. If the answer is just "You don't have to save it to use EditDocument <eom>", it's very possible that neither the question nor the answer will match a query. I try to remember this when I write an answer, but don't always succeed, particularly when the question is one that I would like to answer simply RTFM.

What might actually help more is a usefulness score on postings -- if we could display in the search results an indication of how many people found a particular message useful, and have a way to sort search results by those, that might make it a lot easier to find the best answers that have a bearing on what you searched for.

Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum

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