Get Satisfaction

You might (or not) know that I've been doing quite a lot of thinking and research about multilingualism online (search for "multilingual" on my blog), and one thing I've been dreaming of is a truly multilingual support community.

Satisfaction strikes me as a great opportunity for this. There are quite a lot of strategic/technical issues I'm not going to detail here (yes, it's complicated), but I really think the web needs more spaces where "language management" is close to what it is in real people's lives -- not just a series of linguistic silos.

Customers are not all English-speaking -- and as most people are multilingual, it doesn't really make sense to break up the communities by language.

You can now set the status on different topic types so your customers can see at a glance that you're listening and responding. Here's some Skitchin' to illustrate:

For Questions
Do this:


You get this:


For Ideas
Do this:


You get this:


For Problems
Do this:


You get this:


For Discussions
No status to set for Discussions because, well, they're just discussions.

Wesabe has a fan user captive rating that i like for companies from whom you buy. if you had something similar you could let people quickly create profiles of the companies with whom they have relationships.

I've noticed that the company's best solution duplicates the same (original) message further down the conversation.

Would it be worth either removing the original message (if it's been set as the best solution), or removing the message text and providing an anchor link to the best solution (such as #best-solution)?

I feel that having both messages confuses things a bit, as I have seen a few topics where the official rep's first response is set as the best solution, which means that the original question is displayed, then the best solution, then the rep's response (that was set as the best solution).

I hope my explanation is clear enough!

I just noticed that when the best answer is chosen for a posted question it actually shows twice. Just take a look at this topic as an example: http://getsatisfaction.com/satisfacti...
The best (and only) answer is being shown right under the original question with the title "The best answer from the company" and then it shows again below as a regular answer. Wouldn't it be a little more aesthetic to "move" the chosen answer from the regular position to the best answer position? I hope you get what I'm trying to say :)

It might be worth adding some text next to the image upload fields specifying the maximum (or recommended) dimensions for uploaded images.

This would save people time adjusting their images to "look right".