On the opposite hand there have been complaints from the helpers and helper trainees that it is difficult to tell swiftly if a post has been responded to.
So what I want to know is, would people be interested in a board tracking tool that would make it easier for the helpers to find posts that have not been addressed?
For Example, (Text below is mock up, the links don't really work. Numbers are all fictional.)
Report for July 21
Outstanding Malware Removal Requests.
New Today: 45
24-72 hours old: 70
over 72 hours old: 45
Each of the links could lead to a listing of all threads in that category in order of oldest first.
Outstanding Requests would be any thread in the Malware removal forum that had not recieved a responce by at least a helper trainee, and which was not yet closed.
Are you saying you would have a way to distinguish whether a person at a helper rank has responded?? If so, would it interfere with the running of the forums in any way??
Yes, and, unfortuantely Yes.
I could parse the board for a list of threads and then do a search on each member of each of the helper, helper trainee, and etc groups, to determine what threads they had posted to.
Each time the process runs, it would place a load equivelent to the following:
One "Forum View" + 1 for every full page worth of posts added to Malware removal since last run.
One "Search Malware Removal Forum for Posts by User X" for each Helper, admin, etc.
At the current board population that should be no more than 200 page views, once the program was running on a regularly scheduled basis. (Traffic would be much greater first time run)
Adding in helper trainees would add roughly 700 page views.
All of these would be more efficient done from inside the board, rather than from outside, via modifications to the board, but that would depend on the board admins having both time and familiarity with the boards code as well as a willingness to maintain the code through upgrades of the board and etc. Since from the sound of it, the admin has more useful things to do with there time, it's probably up to us to do it externally.
I am sure with time and thought I could derive more efficient routines. These are just my rough thoughts on how to approach the problem.