#2078 closed enhancement (wontfix)
Bumping v Thumbs Up
| Reported by: |
|
Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Milestone: | Priority: | normal | |
| Severity: | normal | Version: | 2.1 |
| Component: | Component - Topics | Keywords: | |
| Cc: |
Description
Many forum managers and moderators dislike bumping.
Unfortunately, particularly in support forums, it is an important tool to bring attention to unresolved issues, because invariably issues fall off the cracks.
bbPress has a view for unanswered posts which can be somewhat helpful in finding and addressing some unresolved issues, but it still doesn't quite do justice to the issue.
Considering that for many of us, bumping is a fact of life, how about coming from it from a different angle? Instead of writing down forum policies discouraging bumping and then threatening anyone who bumps (wordpress.org support forum policy says bumping is not a good thing, won't get things answered faster and generally speaking you shouldn't bump...nowhere does it say that bumping is banned...but the moderators would ban you fast if you bump posts), let's make bumping a little more palatable.
One reason why bumping is a problem is that folks are often automatically or manually subscribed to topics that they post in. So whenever someone bumps the topic, they get a notification. Even if the notification has the whole message in it (unlike phpBB), some time is wasted. Further, this slows down the discovery of newer, possibly more pertinent and urgent issues.
So, instead of having people type something in message box, merely in order to bump a post without adding any useful information, how about providing a bump button? This would appear (or not) based on forum policy (e.g. only after the last reply is at least 20 days old). When folks see the bump button in lots of posts and not in some (recent) posts, it will encourage them to not bump newer posts in compliance with the policy.
An alternative could be a Stack Overflow type reputation system. People can "thumbs up" posts, and bbPress has a view where via the "wisdom of the crowds" important issues float to the top. This could be done either on "all time votes" (most popular) basis or "recent" (recently popular) basis.
On one hand, this will help in understanding the popular issues. On the other hand, it will prevent bumping in some cases such as when several people bump an issue with a "me too" message without adding significantly new information.
Plugin territory. Bumping is considered bad etiquette by most, and I'm not sure it's our responsibility to address this problem in bbPress core.
Closing as wontfix.