You can create a forum that tracks answered thread status in CS 2008. This is perfect for discussion areas designed for customers getting answers to their questions. To create this experience for your users you’ll need to follow the steps below to first enable thread status tracking for the site & then creating a forum that takes advantage of this.
Open the Forums administration portion of the control panel. It should be yoursite.com/controlpanel/Forums/
Click configuration & then Global Forum Settings
Enable “Thread Status Tracking” and save
Now that thread status tracking is enabled for your site you’ll need to create a new forum (or alter an existing forum) to use this feature. Click “Forums and Groups”
Choose create new forum (or skip if you have already created one) and create the forum.
Enabled thread status tracking on this forum by clicking Forums and choosing an existing forum to “Edit”
While editing this forum click Advanced
In the advanced tab for this forum select “enable thread status tracking” and save.
Now, when new threads are created they can be defaulted to “question” and you’ll see the status icons next to answered and answered threads in that forum.
I can’t say that doing this as as discoverable as we’d like in CS 2008, but I can say that this is something that will be simplified in our next release. In fact we’re improving the whole experience of questions and answers in the next release from initial configuration through finding existing answers. If you have suggestions feel free to send them my way.