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We're going to update some old forum answers and we want your thoughts

We have a super cool new internal thing we’re doing called Project Vulcan which will pull together troubleshooting steps for a wide range of devices in order to better help folks fix their stuff, but faster! We have a team that we’ve hired who are doing this. To date, our team has created over 100 problem pages spanning Apple products to vacuums, with many more on the way. As we've been creating these pages, we've been looking at how and why people are searching for these across the internet.

One huge thing we've noticed is that there are several older answers on the forum that still receive a lot of engagement—there are some cases where the top answer solves the issue for the OP, but doesn't address all of the possible causes that other people, often visiting the post months (or even years) after the answer has been posted, are experiencing. Enter: our freshly written Vulcan pages. (We call these “problem pages” internally.)

We are looking at these older answers and will be plugging in links to these new pages. For example, this answer by @oldturkey03 is a great example. His initial suggestion to reset the TV worked for the OP, but several other users have commented on his post asking for further help. I would imagine oldturkey might not have time to respond to all of these questions, and we feel @billg66’s problem page, Samsung TV Won't Turn On, will probably provide the further assistance many of these users need.

We absolutely don’t want to edit anything in a way that steps on your toes. We plan on adding something like this to the end of oldturkey’s post:

"iFixit Staff Edit: for more details on how to diagnose a bad power supply or motherboard and further assistance with your problem, check out our Samsung TV Won't Turn On troubleshooting page."

As always, we're looking to help people fix the most devices, and to keep things out of the landfill in the process. If you have any feedback or comments on this, we'd love to hear it!!

We really feel like these pages are going to help people fix their stuff.

If you have any questions, tag @austinblakely and I for more information!

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@amber @austinblakely outstanding idea!!!! something like a General Guide for common issues. Love that idea. Just remember to ensure that those common steps to take, remain common as the devices evolve as well. Older Samsung TV's may need different steps than newer ones. Now do the same for T-Con board errors and failed backlights across all LCD TV's. Those are common tests, Add Samsung Mobile phones not powering on to your list as well. Keep Team Vulcan busy ;-)

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That's an interesting idea.

Here is a proposal :

- Instead of adding something to the content of a user’s comment, why not activate a kind of special section at the end of a comment block that will say : "For more details on how to diagnose [...etc...]"

So this would make the project Vulcan related content technically independent of the user's comment and visible immediately after the user's comment. So this special section is reserved to iFixit staff and available for each user answers.

So "iFixit Staff Edit" becomes "iFixit Staff Suggestion"

Like this :

Block Image

This is similar in principle with the suggestion system of other web platforms but this one is handled by iFixit Staff. Also in a future far far away, this could be handled by AI based automated suggestions.

Note : this requires coding a new feature for the iFixit forum.

Note 2 : separate the content from the original user's aswer allows iFixit staff to highlight suggestion created in the context of project vulcan with some additional styles.

Note 3 : reserving this kind of special section can allow iFixit staff to do additional stuff if needed in the future.

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I love these ideas. Thank you for sharing them with us!!

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Hey @es_six, we like the idea and we're going to try to implement it using quote blocks. This wouldn't be formatted quite as fancily as your suggestion and we won't be able to move the text to below the image, but this way we won't need to make any requests to our development team.

It would look like this—let us know what you think!

Block Image

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Hey @austinblakely,

If I understand well, technically, you will insert a quote blocks for suggestion purposes into the user comment, that means the user can edit the iFixit staff suggestion ?

If the user cannot edit the quote block used for the suggestion, so everything is fine.

If the user who posted the comment can edit the suggestion, your proposal can do the job, but in some condition :

  • You can only edit a user comment to add a suggestion quote block to trusted users because if a non-trusted user can edit the quote block, this can lead to security issues, because if a spammer edit the quote block and change the suggestion link to a scam page, this can be problematic.
  • What is a trusted user ?
    • A trusted user is an active user
    • A trusted user has not posted SPAM on iFixit
    • A trusted user has a minimum reputation amount
    • A trusted user has communicated at least once with iFixit team
    • A trusted user has secured his account, because iFixit doesn't seem to provide 2FA it's risky to make iFixit edit into the user comment if the user account regularly gets hacked (exemple : by some fishing campaigns).
    • Example : oldturkey03 is a trusted user.
  • Also, if some users decided to imitate the suggestion quote block to post something (because it's easy to do), they must be treated as SPAM, case by case. Unwanted modifications can be detected using the history of modification of a comment in the forum.

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Amber Taus will be eternally grateful.