Often we see badly formed requests for help on purchasing a car - this is often with new forum members, who register just for posting their car purchase query, and are not much familiar with the carwale forum nor are they methodic and comprehensive in their queries. A typical query might be
I want to purchase a car. Please tell me what to buy.
I am exaggerating, but the information content in these queries is often inadequate, and it takes a long time and repeated explanation of standard points to be able to coax this information out of them. The interaction too, is not smooth, and prone to vagaries of personalities. This makes not only the thread a pain for the owner, but also for those well-meaning members who want to help, but are hamstrung because of lack of info about exact requirements.
What I propose here is a front end like 'recommend me a car' to be applied by default for car purchase queries. The thread initiator should be required to put in as much details as possible, with an option to skip a feature if necessary, with a stock 'don't know' answer. This should cover typically all those points considered in the recommend me a car application. At the end, the extract of the information in the recommend me a car app should be put down in textual form, (it is easy to read the controls and convert the info to equivalent text), and a note about the recommendations (which are pretty sensible in themselves) should appear in the extract as "I have been recommended x y and z cars by cw.' Maybe an embedded link to the recommend output is possible, like we have for reviews and often embeded comparisons.
A separate text box should be allowed for further queries, and the whole discussion should be prefaced with this information, appearing as first post. This makes quick decisions about the car possible, cuts through the BS and repetition on the threads, and will help keep the threads lively.
Wotsay?
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