Nudging the user to RTFM

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squarefractal

Nudging the user to RTFM

Post by squarefractal » 2015-04-21, 16:47

Reading this post by x, I thought, why not remind the user to RTFM when they post about a very commonly known issue?

A proof of concept is shown below. As far as a practical implementation is concerned, maybe Moonchild/Admin can drop in a "rtfm.js" line in the template. Adding the event handlers might be trickier though ... there may be some way to manipulate with the event listeners using purely JS without needing to touch the form code, but I'm not a dev, and neither do I know JS well :)

Code: Select all

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
	<head>
		<title>Test</title>
		<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
	</head>
	<body>
		<script type="text/javascript">
		function hasUserRTFMed () {
			if (document.f_main.x.value.match(/ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap/i)) {
				document.getElementById("rtfm_notice").innerHTML = "<b>Have you cared to RTFM before posting?</b>";
			}
			else {
				document.getElementById("rtfm_notice").innerHTML = "";
			}
		}
		</script>
        <form name="f_main" method="POST" action="/test/test.php">
            <p>Enter text:</p>
            <textarea name="x" rows="8" cols="65" onblur="hasUserRTFMed ();"></textarea><br><br>
			<input type="submit" value="Submit" onmouseover="hasUserRTFMed ();">
        </form>
		<div id="rtfm_notice">
		</div>
    </body>
</html>
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Moonchild
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Re: Nudging the user to RTFM

Post by Moonchild » 2015-04-21, 17:02

People will not read anyway, that includes a notification upon posting.
"Son, in life you do not fight battles because you expect to win, you fight them merely because they need to be fought." -- Snagglepuss
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squarefractal

Re: Nudging the user to RTFM

Post by squarefractal » 2015-04-21, 17:27

IMO, an appropriate colour, styling and positon will encourage many such people to read. For this forum, just over the three buttons (Save draft/Preview/Submit) would be a good idea.

The text, of course, needs to be concise. Perhaps something along these lines:
You are probably posting about a well-known issue. Please read the following resources for information about this issue before posting.
(The moderators may delete this thread if it turns out to be already discussed in the below links.)
  • Link 1
  • Link 2
  • ...
Of course, you can't do anything about those users -- but if you have 20 posts now, and 2 posts after implementing this, would you not call that an improvement?
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Moonchild
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Re: Nudging the user to RTFM

Post by Moonchild » 2015-04-21, 19:55

This is a forum - not helpdesk software that offers these kinds of contextual things when submitting a new ticket.
Also, it would require more maintenance to maintian a loist of "common issues" and another list of "relevant resources" for each "common issue".
No, posts will just get disapproved at this point if people are obviously asking for something that is clearly already answered and would just create more redundancy.
"Son, in life you do not fight battles because you expect to win, you fight them merely because they need to be fought." -- Snagglepuss
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Re: Nudging the user to RTFM

Post by squarefractal » 2015-04-22, 04:55

Moonchild wrote:Also, it would require more maintenance to maintian a loist of "common issues" and another list of "relevant resources" for each "common issue".
If you're not open to a manual solution, I'm sure some phpBB "extensions" (or whatever the server-software specific additions are called) that do this kind of thing, that displays related topics before an user posts (like the one seen on Stackexchange sites)?

Although, I guess it's not an acceptable solution at all, since point 1 of Moonchild's post applies.
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Re: Nudging the user to RTFM

Post by Moonchild » 2015-04-22, 08:12

If it is something that a mod can offer and that can dynamically pull potentially relevant threads out of the database, then I'd consider it.
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