Improvement: Allow sub comments to be marked as solved or helpful

[Kathrin84]

Hi there,

a user came up with this issue. He encountered that it's not possible to mark comments as solved or helpful which are sub comments (second layer):

We think that this feature makes a lot of sense as the correct or most helpful answer can also occur in sub comments.

Best, Kathrin

[christianwolters]

Hi Kathrin

I second your proposition.

Dear maintainers: Is there an explicit use case or reason for this design?

Best regards
Christian

[Dagefoerde]

Thanks for your remarks. Yes, there is a reason: Our role model does it the same way. :)

I believe the idea is that, if a sub-comment is solved/helpful, others should encourage the poster of that sub-comment to post it as a first-level answer that can then be marked appropriately.
That way, a solved or helpful answer is a full, self-contained post (that could, for example, summarize a discussion thread). In contrast, sub-comments could be just incremental additions to a partially correct answer.

[Dagefoerde]

Apart from that, you can still express your gratitude for a good sub-comment by upvoting it.

[christianwolters]

Hi Jan,

ah of course... but comments in SO are small comments, in MO they look like equal answers.

At least to users that do not know SO this looks inconsistend.
Maybe we need additional help text explaining this
and/or an additional option that allows marking of sub comments.

[Dagefoerde]

I do get the point of the issue, and I think that it's a valid suggestion. We don't need to copy everything from the role model; it would be okay to deviate. I like the idea of creating a module setting for this, so that teachers can decide whether to follow the role model or whether to enable marking of sub-comments.