Recently active topics in Get Satisfaction tagged with satisfaction faq

UPDATE Will be updating this topic again. The interface has just changed so these first few steps do not reflect the current design any longer.

Start a topic
Have a question, idea, problem or just want to talk? Start typing in the box at the top of the page and see if any similar topics are already in the system.


Click on one of the topics or see all search results:


From the search results page you can click on the topic if you find it or start a new one:


OR, just lick the "Start a Topic" button at the top of the page.


Pick a category: Question, Idea, Problem or Discussion. Enter your topic and a brief but descriptive title:



Add a relevant product or service:



Tag it and tell everyone how you're feeling about it:



Finally, be sure you've done all you can to make your topic as noticeable and findable as possible. Then submit it!:


Browse topics
On the Company home page you can see a paginated list of all topics in that community. You can view them by the default view "Recenty Active", by "Latest Topics" or by "Unanswered". You can also filter the list of topics by type of topic by clicking on the list above the tabs: Questions, Ideas, Problems, Talk or by Products or Tags which are displayed toward the top of the page.

Tags
Toward the top of a Company Home page is a grouping of Popular Tags. Clicking on any of these tags will give you a list of all topics with that tag. Each topic has a list of tags associated with it when tags have been assigned. You can add tags to any topic.


Products & Services
There is a list of Popular Products & Services on the Company home page as well. Clicking on any of these will give you a list of all topics associated with that product or service.


Clicking the "+" will add a product to your dashboard. Clicking the "-" will remove it from your dashboard.


You can also click on the "They make x products" link to see a page with all products associated with company. From this page you can view all the products associated with or related to the company, you can add new products, you can add products to your dashboard and you can click through to any specific product page where you'll see all associated topics and have the option of editing the product details.


People's Pick
"People's Pick" is no longer being used. We now have a system that is more explicit in its meaning. Questions have "answers". Problems have "solutions". Ideas have "good points". When enough people mark someone's reply this way, it will be displayed at the top of the page. If you simply liked what someone had to say, but it doesn't specifically solve a problem or answer a question, you can leave a quick comment for them.

Official Responses and Status
Company representatives are able to mark the status on topics and mark their answers as the Best Answer or Solution from the company. It too, sticks to the top of the topic page and can be viewed inline in the context of the conversation. See this topic for further explanation.

Your Dashboard
Every registered user has a dashboard which you can access by clicking "You" in the top bar. Here you can edit your public profile, view a list of all topics you've participated in across all of Get Satisfaction, keep track of your stats in the system, manage products and companies you wish to follow, and edit your account settings*. You can also subscribe to a RSS feed of your acitvity from your dashboard.

*Account Settings
Account settings are part of your dashboard. This is where you can edit your personal information such as nickname, real name, email address, avatar, tagline, location, password, etc. This is also where you would go to close your account, edit your title if you're officially involved with any companies and set your notification preferences.

Profile
Clicking on another user's name will take you to their profile page. Here you'll see their public profile information, their site usage stats, all topics they've participated in across all of getsatisfaction.com and a list of the companies, products and services they use.

Add a company
If you don't find the company you want to discuss on the Companies page or from the company search at the top of every page, you can add it here. If you're officially affiliated with the company you can claim it!

That's about it. Pretty simple all in all. So dive in and start participating in the conversation!

It's really quite easy to change the look-and-feel of your Help Center, though it may not be immediately obvious how to navigate the files. I'll try to make it simple to wrap your head around what's going on.

I'm going to assume you've downloaded and installed your Help Center, and it's running with all the "factory settings." I'll refer to the root directory as helpcenter. The standard issue theme is located in helpcenter/themes/default. It holds all the css and templates that are used. (Note that while there is an images directory in that path for theme-specific images, all basic images are contained in helpcenter/images)

You can customize the visual styling of your Help Center to an incredible degree with CSS alone. The base stylesheet is style.css, which styles the bread and butter components that you probably don't want to change, at least not to start. This stylesheet also links to "sprinkles_default.css" which contains styles for the elements that you're likely to want to change from a branding standpoint (colors, typography, header, sidebar, footer, forms). To quickly get a feel for what this stylesheet controls you can flip these two lines:

/*@import url('sprinkles_envy.css');*/
@import url('sprinkles_default.css');

Just uncomment the first line and comment out the second one. Now reload your Help Center to see the effects. Nifty, eh? Okay, now change it back so the following descriptions make sense.

If you're familiar with CSS you should recognize the landscape when you open up sprinkles_default.css. This isn't a CSS tutorial so I won't describe exactly how to achieve various effects, but it is reasonably well commented for finding your way around. However, the code at the top of the stylesheet bears some explanation.

In order to make it easy to change the layout and number of columns we borrowed code from Andy Skelton and Scott Allan Wallick's Sandbox Wordpress Theme. With their system all you need to do is uncomment the line that corresponds to the layout you want. So in the default setting we're using 2 columns with the sidebar on the right, shown below:

/* Two-column with sidebar on right */
@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/2c-r.css');
/* Two-column with sidebar on left */
/*@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/2c-l.css');*/
/* Three-column with sidebars on left */
/*@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/3c-l.css');*/
/* Three-column with sidebars on right */
/*@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/3c-r.css');*/
/* Three-column with content in the center */
/*@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/3c-b.css');*/
/* One-column with content in the center */
/*@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/1c-b.css');*/

To change this to three columns with two sidebars on the left you'd comment out the current line and uncomment this one:

@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/3c-l.css');

This system works because the sidebar template (sidebar.t) breaks the sidebar content into two parts defined by ids called "primary" and "secondary". You could hack that template to further customize the layout.

You should be able to get dramatic effects with just editing this one CSS file.

-----
If you want to really edit the contents or structure of the pages you can create a whole new theme. You can start by copying the default theme, naming it something meaningful to you. You'd end up with something like this: helpcenter/themes/custom. In order to use this new theme rather than default, open up helpcenter/Sprinkles.php with a text editor and edit the path on this line:

$smarty->template_dir = $sprinkles_dir . '/themes/default/templates/';

In the case above we'd just change the word "default" to "custom".

The templates themselves use a PHP templating system called Smarty [http://smarty.net]. This allows us to keep the arcane php code out of the html, replacing it with the simpler Smarty code that is used inside curly brackets like this: {smarty_code}. There are templates for both pages and page objects like header, footer and sidebar. When a page object needs to be displayed inside a page template it is called with a bit of code that looks like this:

{include file="template_name.t"}

The template names match the url for the page you're on. So if you want to edit the contents or layout of http://help.YOURDOMAIN.com/helpstart.php you would edit themes/custom/helpstart.t and any page objects that are linked inside it.

For those who may not be aware this is possible or get that it's possible but haven't figured out how to do it, read on...

Disclaimer: We are working on refining this process. We are aware that it is currently awkward and overly complicated and not at all intuitive.

That said, this is how to currently do it:

Let's say you want to associate Company A's product (we'll call it Foo) with Company B.

1. Go to Company A's Product & Services page (you'll find the tab on their Get Satisfaction home page)

2. Click on the product or service you want to associate ("Foo") which opens up that product page

3. Click the "Edit this product" link over on the right

4. That launches a modul window that allows you to edit the details of the product or service. Under "Related Companies" click the "Add another relationship" button

5. Start typing the company name "Company B" and you will be given a list of results. Select the correct result and then select a relationship type. Then click the Save Product button.

6. Now you should see "Foo" over on Company B's Products & Services page under the "Related To" tab. AND it will show up as a product or service option when creating a new topic fo Company B.

(screenshots coming...)

Making Tags : I Did it for my listed COMPANY once ... and I can visit those tags but seem to have lost my way so I could TAG some more. Why is this so hard to find?

UPDATE:
The Get Satisfaction system will dynamically create FAQs over time as users ask questions and they get answered by reps and other users. However, we know that many companies want to leverage their existing FAQs. Since Get Satisfaction works by harnessing real dialog, and traditional FAQs are usually formal documentation, it doesn't make sense to confuse your "real" voice with that of the documentation so instead, create a user that is clearly the "official voice".

• We recommend: Set up a user account, separate from your own with the nickname "[company name] FAQ" (See the Timbuk2 Get Satisfaction site for an example or see screenshot below)


• Add the question part of your FAQ as a Question from that FAQ user account


• Reply to the question either as the FAQ user if the response is your company's formal response or as yourself if you plan to give a response in your own words.


• Tag them with "faq" and "help"


• If you're an Official Rep or Admin for your site you can mark your replies as the "company answer".


The following screenshot shows how Timbuk2 has posted their FAQ questions with their FAQ user account, has answered them with a personal user account and where they can click to mark it as the best answer:



An example of appropriate tags for FAQs and what happens when you mark your FAQ answer as the company answer:




• If you have a large number of FAQs or knowledge base, talk to us about options for importing them into Satisfaction. (email info [at] getsatisfaction [dot] com)

UPDATE:

By replying to a topic you are automatically following it. However, if you'd like to follow a topic without replying to it click the "Follow this discussion" link for a "Talk" post, the "I have this problem too" button for a "Problem" post, the "I have this question too" button for a "Question" post, or the "I like this idea too" button on an "Idea" post.









Following a topic means you'll receive email notifications when an update is made to the topic and the topic will appear in your Dashboard.

If you want to "un-follow" a topic click the "stop following it" link.