Does anyone know of existing products that could help with any or all of the following:

- Make sure questions get answered if possible. They shouldn't just scroll off the bottom of our inbox without some action. They shouldn't trail off, requiring the person with the problem to repeat themselves. For threads that aren't terminated cleanly, nag the people involved for a resolution, maybe after a week -- long enough they may have fixed the problem on their own, but not so long that they would forget how they solved it. Combined with the FAQ concept below, the idea would be to get a resolution on everything (either an "accepted answer" as on experts-exchange, or a reply-to-self with the solution found), condense it down to the essentials, and mark the thread as completed.

- Get the right people involved. Sometimes it's obvious that the core dev team would be the right ones to answer a question; sometimes anyone with basic SQL experience would do, sometimes anyone with experience with a certain server environment would be better, sometimes you need a PSQL expert. We can't have lists for all of those, but something that helps narrow the field of options would be great -- only three people are likely to have an answer, make sure those three know they're needed here, and don't bother them if anyone could answer. Some sort of skill-tagging, marking a thread as needing certain skills, and prioritizing items in a person's inbox based on the rarity of the skill and the person's skill list?

- Keep busy people involved. I, for one, subscribe by email; if I participate in a conversation, or am just a passive but interested observer, I don't have a good way to keep tabs on just a few threads inside the larger list. On a busy day, I may not have time to look for new questions to answer, but I might have time to keep up to date with the ones I'm already a part of. The current system doesn't make that easy. I get flooded, which is only sometimes okay. A "follow this" button would be one approach, prioritizing threads I participate in or am interested in. (JIRA has this, to some degree.)

- Manage thread splits. The problem with "take this discussion elsewhere" is that everyone involved in the conversation has to make sure they join the new group, and pick up a (now-broken) email thread. No idea what to do about it.

- Help people help themselves. When questions get answered, the FAQ should be updated if at all possible. Threads are great, but finding a topic by thread and then jumping to the short conclusion would be nicer; and if we could subscribe to a "tip of the day" generated based on actual experiences, that could be good too. If the FAQ is clearly being updated regularly, it can be made an integral part of asking a question, too.

- Manage current events. Everyone should know where to reliably find out about recent important issues -- the tracker being down, the latest version having an important regression, etc. -- so the same questions don't keep popping up in the lists.

Firebird has a great community, I'm looking for options to make it even more effective.

Helen, sorry about the OT in firebird-support. =)

-Philip