Accepted Solutions: 10,000 and Counting

I blogged about Accepted Solutions a while back—it is a feature that we introduced in our community forums in February. For those that may not remember, Accepted Solutions allows a customer who originates a discussion thread to highlight a post within it that answered or solved their question. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Original Post/Question:

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Original Poster selects the post within the thread that answered their question and that post becomes the Accepted Solution:

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Back when I blogged about it in April, we had just crossed the 5,000 mark. Things are still humming along over the last four months—last week we crossed the 10,000 mark for Accepted Solutions. So, why does this matter for the community? Two reasons: 1) our customers who use our products every day are the ones in best position to say what fixes their problem and 2) Connecting new customers with information that helps them with their product is one of the most important things we need to get better at across our community sites.

Taking a deeper dive into the 10,000, have a guess as to what the most viewed accepted solution is addressing? It’s instructions on how to downgrade from Vista to XP, with over 7,000 views and solved by community member mfinnan101. Choices in operating systems, whether it’s more systems available with XP or Linux, has been a hot topic and discssion for our community and one of the most popular topics on IdeaStorm.

The forum board with the most Accepted Solutions is XPS Desktops with 939, followed by XPS Laptops with 564. Both boards have a wide range of questions and answers about support, how-to’s, and what to buy. As for the community members who have contributed and created the most accepted solutions, the honor goes to ejn63 with a total of 683 and has posted over 57,000 times on our forum, followed by SR45 with 319 and has posted over 25,000 times.

If you are familiar with forum threads, you can probably attest . That finding an answer is not always easy. Accepted Solutions give other users an easier way to find the post within the thread that holds the answer, without having to read through the entire thread. Case in point, the average views of an Accepted Solution is increasing—right now, the average is about250 views per accepted solution, and 2.5 million views totalMoving forward, with some of the integration that Lionel hinted at is still being worked on. We hope to facilitate this process so that more customers who need answers can find them.

About the Author: Natalie D