Learn, share, and get recognized
This may be a stupid question, but I'm curious why some posts end up with the number of an Apple knowledge base article in their title and also bookmarked at the top of the post itself.
Here's an example:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3667087?tstart=0
Is this something people do manually, or does the system do it automatically? The articles don't necessarily seems terribly relevant to the posts.
It is a new feature within the Knowledge Base with a link that takes you here to post a question.
It is a new feature within the Knowledge Base with a link that takes you here to post a question.
The articles don't necessarily seems terribly relevant to the posts.
Agreed. Confusing isn't it? 😕
Yes, it's pretty confusing and clunky, to be honest. Nearly every one of these posts seems to have been written from the "How to find your serial number" article, but has nothing to do with finding a serial number.
Nearly every one of these posts seems to have been written from the "How to find your serial number" article, but has nothing to do with finding a serial number.
Just speculation, Clay, but this might be the mechanism for that with the iPhone posts.
You're new to the iPhone, you've got an issue with it and you go to iPhone support. You're not sure what to look for so you click the big "Get started" button:
That takes you to:
http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/getstarted/
You look through everything in that, ending up with the HT1349 document, which happens to be the document (currently) in the list with an "Ask a question" interactivity. You haven't found anything covering your issue ... so you think it might be worth asking a question using the form.
If that's what it going on, the questions sprouted off HT1349 showing up in the forums should be more likely to be not about 1349 than they should be about 1349. (Because people are using the link because they haven't been able to find anything in the 1349 documentation and other things in the Get Started section.)
deggie wrote:
It is a new feature within the Knowledge Base with a link that takes you here to post a question.
Didn't you mean to say "new non-feature that mostly adds confusion".
Terrible idea!
95% of the posts do not relate to the support article.. = useless.
I think it's a good idea that still needs some work. You may well frequent one of the forums that is an inappropriate target for a number of support articles, in which case reporting posts to be moved with an explanation would be one way to help improve the system. For instance an article on renting movies on your computer originally had links to iTunes U and iPod touch. Of course you're always going to find some people will ask completely unrelated questions once they've clicked through to a place where it is possible, but then that is nothing new.
tt2
Hi,
What the "unrealted" questions do prove is that people are not searching the way the info is laid out.
A person from Great Britain would search for "How to Drive a Manual Gear Box car "
Someone from the States is more likely to ask about "Driving a Stick Shift"
Although Apple does do some really clever links to searches like the two above an get you to the same Doc it does not always work.
For instance this iChat thread questions why iChat 5 does not work (It may do but the poster has not got that far yet)
They do link to an Article that relates to getting a Screen Name from with iChat.
Although the article and the question are somewhat linked the way the question is posted points to the Poster "Thinking Different" in their own way.
Mac 101 > iChat seems to be a common linked article when the questions are even further out as it were.
They do manage though to get the poster to explain what they mean and link to and article and you can see the gaps.
I reckon that can save at least 10 posts questioning the OP on what they mean and getting common terms of reference.
(I am sure there are worse that people have come across. This is just my view)
10:35 PM Wednesday; April 18, 2012
Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"
iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Lion 10.7.3)
G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
Mac OS X (10.6.8),
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images." No, Seriously
Why do some posts have a knowledge base article number in the title?
