Suggestion : default first post template to get basic information in support forum

I have a suggestion that might help the Manjaro Team and others provide timely, quality support.

How do you get users to provide basic information.

It seems Manjaro has four ways to help users help themselves or provide quality troubleshooting information.

  1. The tag line on the forum home page, “We’re happy to have you here. If you need help, please search before you post.”

  2. The first post in the Support Category, About the Support category.

  3. Suggest the user search the forum or Internet

  4. And then basically when the user posts a new Topic and says, “I have a problem, help me”, with no basic information. Someone will add a post describing how to get help, like:

I did some research in the Discourse forum before posting this Topic. Jeff Atwood called this, “default first post template”. Basically, it sounds like a template can be used in the Support Category to prompt the user for the basic tech support information when they create the Topic. The template can be restricted to a specific Category.

If you look at the top of the discourse post, they specifically mention a “Technical Support Forum” Use Case.

Just a thought… :slight_smile:

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@codesardine It appears we would need the official Discourse Templates plugin:

I don’t quite have a handle on discourse way of documenting. There doesn’t appear to be any official formal documentation, just discourse-style.

The Topic Templates are built-in already and created by the admin by going to Edit…. This meta.discourse image shows Edit > Topic Template.

  • This link appears to indicate it is a pain to change the template when there are many subcategories because it is a manual process.

  • This link indicates the Topic Template might not be user-friendly on a mobile device.

The Discourse Templates are “canned reply templates”. They provide a way to have a consistent message to a post. I could see those being used as a reply to the original post when indicating further information is required. I’m not sure if it can be used as a Topic Template.

There were some discourse posts that talked about forms and here, and the use of the Placehold Forms.

I ran into brave which uses templates in their support forum.

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