As I trawl through the new posts and see something I can reply to, I often ask myself, "how much about PC's does this guy/girl know". Ok some of them have followed advice and posted their specs so you could presume they are pretty savvy, however coming from a support desk background I have dealt with everyone from newbies with no idea what a mouse is to those who have used PC;s for a while.

My proposal is a scale next to the name with 1 being a complete novice to 10 being someone who has worked with PC's for a while and is pretty competent at most if not all aspects of PC's.

This means that people answering his questions could do so with either a breakdown of the fix or simply a quick guide dependant on the rating.

The user could during the course of his stay at techspot adjust the scale accordingly as his knowledge grows.


I do understand that their are different sections of the forum, for instance when it comes to malware removal I rate a 2, someone like howard would rate a 10.

I can see that there are 12 different subject catagories covered by techspot, maybe adding to the users profile a list of the catagories and the relevant scale would allow people to check the profile and see how competent they are at a particular subject.

Regards

Sounds like a great idea!

Are you trying make Techspot as complicated as Facebook ?

It`s usually pretty clear from the nature of the question,and how it`s asked,

what the level is.

A big problem here..

Many people are way less knowledgeable than they think. Even worse, they would rather deliberately break their computer and call you names than admit it.

I would trust the objectivity of those people who say their rating is 1-3. And I would steer far away from anyone who dares to say they are 9 or 10.

Agree! ......

Im not trying to make it complicated, and as someone who has been around a while, I find it hard to judge technical ability based on a question asked, for instance the chap who says he has posted his results from the program "everest", may know enough to post that but not enough to find his way round the OS in general, for example could he find the way to stop a service from running, his post doesnt make it clear.

I agree with Nodsu and Jobeard there will always be some that brag about their technical ability and its these that will fall over when someone posts a short reply that they cant follow as they need to know more about how to solve it.

If you want a for example:

Hi

I see in task manger that I have a UPS service running, I dont need the UPS service running how do I stop it.

Answer

Go into services and change it to disabled.

Easy and quick answer but then ask "does the poster know how to get to services?"

SO the correct answer would be

Start >Run >services.msc> enter >find UPS service double click it and change "startup type" to disabled, apply and OK

Knowing a posters technical ability would stop people from having to reanswer a question because the answer was in a format that was to brief.

Regards

So why not give the full answer,first ?

You have to remember,the thread will be read by many people,

with similar problems,in the future.

Typing two sentences instead of one,isn`t that stressful.

Good point.

imo; the success of T.S. has occured in-part by the generous 'we-take-on-all-commers' attitude of the contributors.
let's keep it that way

we have the skills to wade thru it all to find the root causes and getting
accurate inputs from all users at the outset is (sadly) a low probability event.

Id say keep it the way it is. Though its a really good idea there will always be examples of this..

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic51076.html

I still smile when i read this thread. Total shot in the dark, But worked a treat!

Besides the problem of implementing such a scale/system is getting people to use it and newcomers not to abuse it, but in the overall picture it sounds like a good idea.

At the moment we are more focused on implementing a redesign and newer backend still under development but this is something to keep in mind. Perhaps a more democratized system like the "Thank you" voting could work in a similar fashion, we will see in the coming months.