No, those are the easy parts. The hardest parts come with the "discussions" as to which questions belong in that section, and which do not. Eg. A person quite new to Perl may think a question about a regex matching too greedily is "hard", whereas people who have been around a while consider that "simple" stuff.
As to figuring out whether a question has been "answered successfully" or not, that would require a) some changes to the way the site works, and b) more participation on the part of the questioner, who would have to return to her/his node and hit some button saying 'answered'. It seems to me that not everyone would participate, and thus a list of supposedly unanswered questions will in fact just be abandonded ones, or ones where the author hasnt bothered..
How would *you* define a successful answer, and how change the site to accommodate that?
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First off, thank you, castaway, for taking the time to consider my request in depth. I would say that it would take something like a voting system to get a node into the Tough Questions section, although I find it hard enough to use up my votes as it is so I would understand hesitancy. ;-D
Perhaps, if a node gets four ticks by users who are Abbots and up, including the OP? And, if a node does get ticked, there's a list of them somewhere to alert others to upvote or downvote the tick count.
On the second concept, I would suggest a 1 to 5 score, where 5 means 'need more help!' This counter would degrade to zero over the course of a few days unless the OP keeps pushing it up. Then, a page such as Recently Active would have a little hotspot indicator on it with shades of red to attract interest. This counter could be squelched by any Abbot-and-up Monk to keep nuisances from abusing us.
Does this sound plausible? PM gets a goodly amount of traffic, and, certainly, adding counters to every single node has to have much benefit to be worth the overhead and storage.
If I have erred on the side of silly, I will gladly recite 3000 Wallexps and cover my head in ashes donated by the blessed merlyn.
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