Why are posts ignored?

[pokerie]

I don't know if it's me expecting too much, but everytime I look for something on this forum I find someone asking the same question and think 'Great! Now I can find some replies from people who know vBulletin inside and out'. Alas! I get to the post and it's just been ignored, even when the person has replied 'anyone?' or similar to his own post.

Surely there should be 'sorry, this feature is impossible and will never be available' or 'we've read your post but we can't do this at the moment', but nothing??? I've posted twice myself with questions and been ignored. It's not like this is just a standard web forum, we're paying customers (proven on registration!) so shouldn't we be getting a better service than this? Am I out of order expecting this??
I even asked for one of my posts to be deleted as it was pointless it being there with no replies. Even this wasn't done.

Please tell me if I've got all this wrong.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

The price you pay is for the use of vBulletin and to get official support (ticket system and vbulletin.com) by paid professional staff.

vBulletin.org is totally run and depending on input from vollunteers. There will never be a garantuee to get an answer/solution or a "right to get service". Volunteers will mostly try to help other members as good as they can, and their time allows.

I will look into your other posts and will see if i can find a reason why it was not replied to and come back to you here.

[Zachariah]

Very Normal.

There are a lot of personal projects and focused goals when people come to this site and do not see it. (it may be a few months before I visit parts of this site and I am on it almost 2-3 hours a day) Many times questions are not answered if there is an answer on the site that an adv. search can find.

Try "bumping" a post once a week. It might only be seen by the people that want a similar function and not someone that can help.

[pokerie]

I see. I thought vBulletin paid people to keep this forum going as a modification arm to vbulletin.com. My bad.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Ok i did check on your previous posts. First thing what often go wrong is that when a member view a question, he might not have the complete answer ready, and might not reply thinking that someone else will come along who can give a better answer. If nobody comes along with a real good answer (or those that could just don't have the time to do so at the time they read the post), questions might go unanswered. This is not good towards the person who asks the question, but it is the result of a site ran by volunteers.

Ok about your posts (i am only trying to find possible reasons why it goes unanswered):
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=79663
That thread shows pretty good community together creating a solution to the original question, and by the looks of it, they succeeded. After the solution is posted that seem to work, you make 1 post stating it "didn't work" for you. My guess is that nobody answered because that just is not enough information to work with. Without knowing exactly what you did and in which lines of the code, it is difficult to address your problem.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=114417
Not really sure why. I guess it is a mix. Discussion and questions about vBExternal will have the biggest chance to get a usefull answer if posted in the support thread of that hack. Talk about (missing) vBulletin standard functionality, should better be addressed at vb.com.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=115221
You posted you solved. Not so many people really know the ins&outs of handling RSS feeds I think. Again official support at vb.com would have probably been a better place, also the documentation might have helped.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=115057
Should have been posted in teh Modification Discussions. You will not get a coder audience in the General vB forum. Also posting what you have already tried (code examples) will probably trigger more people to try and help you.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=114191
Mods don't read every post (and will very likely miss an edited post). If you want to have your thread (re)moved, use the Report post link to bring your request to the attention of the Staff.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=112756
Was answered.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

I see. I thought vBulletin paid people to keep this forum going as a modification arm to vbulletin.com. My bad.No, everyone on this site is an unpaid volunteer, from Admin to Coders to members.

[pokerie]

Thanks for the replies. Considering you're all volunteering, you're doing a great job.

[hambil]

I think an interesting thing is brought up here though. I would probably answer more support questions if they where easier to find, and if there was some sort of reward system. Perhaps a combination of forum cleanup, so we have just one support forum, and maybe a 'thank you' button on a post that contributes toward the staffs decisions on titles, and perhaps even contributes to a 'member of the month' award...

Just thinking out loud.

[Zachariah]

I would probably answer more support questions if they where easier to find, and if there was some sort of reward system.

Your reward is personal fulfillment. :banana: It makes ya want to dance at times. :)

[Lottis]

I think an interesting thing is brought up here though. I would probably answer more support questions if they where easier to find, and if there was some sort of reward system. Perhaps a combination of forum cleanup, so we have just one support forum, and maybe a 'thank you' button on a post that contributes toward the staffs decisions on titles, and perhaps even contributes to a 'member of the month' award...

Just thinking out loud.
Great thinking.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

I doubt putting all support in1 forum would get more questions answered, but i might be wrong.

I think that when all is in 1 forum, a lot of coders would not even bother to go through all the posts to see if there is a new coding question. Just using coders as an example here.

[hambil]

I doubt putting all support in1 forum would get more questions answered, but i might be wrong.

I think that when all is in 1 forum, a lot of coders would not even bother to go through all the posts to see if there is a new coding question. Just using coders as an example here.
You could use thread prefixes, like in hacks. If done right it would be very easy to filter for specific types of questions. Perhaps you could even subscribe to a forum/thread prefix combination.

[Rich]

If all support questions were grouped together, even more would be lost. There would just be too many to keep up with in one forum and many would be lost in the shuffle.

The site already has issues with repetitive questions being asked because many people don't use the search feature. Image if posts were being pushed down and then "lost" because people couldn't keep up with them. The repetitiveness of the same questions would drive everyone nuts.

[hambil]

Also, perhaps when a support question is answered the thread creator can click on a 'helped' button that would mark the thread as answered, so it could be filtered out when searching for questions to answer. I just went to one of the forums and answered a couple questions, but I had to read through entire threads to see if it had already been answered, and half the time it had.

[pokerie]

Well once I sort out this rss issue I've been having I'll happily post a detailed description of how I went about it, because displaying a single thread of your choice on a non forum page seems to be something that a lot of people are asking for on here and elsewhere.

I know you can definitely do it as I've seen similar systems on many sites using vBulletin, where mods display a forum post/thread as an article with comments that are replies in the thread.

So the reward you guys get out of helping me is that I'll help other people in turn. I know this won't be the case with all forum members though.

[Zachariah]

Well once I sort out this rss issue I've been having I'll happily post a detailed description of how I went about it, because displaying a single thread of your choice on a non forum page seems to be something that a lot of people are asking for on here and elsewhere.

I know you can definitely do it as I've seen similar systems on many sites using vBulletin, where mods display a forum post/thread as an article with comments that are replies in the thread.

So the reward you guys get out of helping me is that I'll help other people in turn. I know this won't be the case with all forum members though.

Use RSS feed and a java script.

Reff:
FPS_EXTERNAL
(https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=105008&highlight=external)

[amykhar]

Javascript is satan's programming language :D

[Zachariah]

I love when she calls me her little devil. :knockedout:

[hambil]

I'm pretty sure satan is a sys admin, not a programmer.

[pokerie]

Use RSS feed and a java script.

Reff:
FPS_EXTERNAL
(https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=105008&highlight=external)

This is exactly what I've been trying for the last week. If you could tell me how to pull an entire individual thread by id, including attached image and display it completely on a non-forum page, I'll be forever in your debt. I've been able to display latest activity and new threads in specific forums, but not with attached image because I can't get the enclosure tag working. I've tried magpie and simplepie as parsers - only thing I haven't tried is the beta2 of simplepie that supports any type of enclosure as I only found out about it today.

In the meantime I've decided to change angle and use wordpress to compose the articles and link them to a vbulletin thread for comments. I've found a lot of posts and plugins on here. If anyone could point me towards the best/most appropriate solution using wordpress, again, I'd be very grateful.

[Freesteyelz]

What if two (voluntary) support groups were implemented: Coders and Designers. Rather than dumping all of the questions in one forum we'll have two (Coding Questions and Designing Questions). Quetions that don't fit in one forum will be forwarded to the other.

Err...Or something like that?