I’m used to discussing Krita at https://discuss.kde.org, where threads are not ever closed, much less a mere 4 days after a comment is marked as the solution. Were it to have done so, I would have lost a lot of good answers which happened to come months after the original thread.
As an example, How to make a pixel art signage look non-flat? - #2 by Takiro contains an answer the solution, and it’s the sole response (thus far). Consequently, it’s the current solution. However, with a mere single response, I don’t want the thread to be locked, forcing me to spammily duplicate it, should I want another response. Instead, I should be able to mark that answer as the solution until/unless someone provides a better one.
All this policy does is incentivise me to never mark the best answer (thus far) as the solution, and it means that in the future, when the solution changes, I cannot update it.
I fail to understand why this policy was considered more advantageous than not, because the opposite appears inherently evident.
If you don’t feel like a solution is the best then don’t accept it as solution, that’s perfectly okay. The main issue here is that the topic should never have been in General Questions to begin with because it’s a the category for tech support. It should have been in Art Discussions for example where accepting a solution isn’t even an option, its for open ended discussions.
The reason why we lock tech support topics so quickly is because they tend to get outdated quickly and are usually very specific to people’s setups and devices.
The ‘Solved’ marker is for definite problems that users need to be solved.
Once that is done then it’s done.
A situation that happens is that new users find a topic, by searching or randomly noticing it, that seems similar to their problem then immediately add a reply saying. “I have this problem too”.
The overall impression is that the new user hasn’t actually read any content in the topic.
Careful questioning then reveals that they do not have exactly the same problem and are not even using the same version or operating system and they definitely need to start a new topic for their problem.
So, a Solved topic has complicated misunderstandings added to the end of it.
Overall, it’s better to close a Solved topic.
In your case, you want possibilties and hope to see more than one way of doing thjings.
You can remove the Solved marker or you could ask for the category to be changed as just suggested by @Takiro.
@Takiro, that can’t be known until you get a better solution, right? Sure, a user could DM the post author, but then that information isn’t public anymore.
I would have expected that all topics have solutions enabled so that threads which ask for advice can prominently display the best answer (again, like the aforementioned Discourse instance) but if they don’t, then that’s at least internally consistent. Thanks.
On that note, I’d like to mark your response here as the solution too, but evidently can’t.
@RokeJulianLockhart
I just edited your post to remove a swear word. Please don’t do that. This is a family-friendly forum.
Not every category closes threads after 4 days. Some remain permanently open. If ever you see a post that needs to be reopened, send a private message to the moderators and one of us will look at it.
Most of the topics are largely opinion based and there is normally no definite answer to things like “what’s the best <thing>” or even “how to do <thing> the best way” (like in your case) because many people probably have different opinions on what is best. Therefore it rarely makes sense to mark an opinion as a solution since there’s normally not an opinion that is factually better than another (like you already concluded yourself). For the same reason sites like Stack Overflow don’t even allow questions for opinions. And that’s why some categories allow for “solutions” and others don’t.
@sooz, if there was one, that was a mistake. Such terminology, unless I’ve misidentified it, is not part of my standard lexicon. Apologies.
Indeed, and that’s what I’ve done often on https://forums.opensuse.org, which is easily the most stringent with such rules that I’ve seen yet. However, I can’t imagine others willing to do so frequently, and in that case - a mere request to open a thread being sufficient - the choice to close the thread automatically seems more perplexing to me.
@Takiro, that makes sense if we’re pedantic about the term utilized for the button. Otherwise, as I anecdotally see in most Discourse instances, it’s merely a way to pin the most useful answer.