Unanswered questions

would like to be able to sort a forum by the number of answers to post
so the ones with the zero come to top. There are two reasons a post gets zero answers, one it's a stupid post, the other it's a truly difficult question that not very many people knows the answer of.

So to that end it would be nice to be able to "vote stupid posts off the island." like indicating I didn't answer this because incompletely specified, multiple, or read php.net or something.

Then only the hard interesting questions would percolate to the top. Too many times the hard questions gets buried before the smart people has a chance to see it.

If I understand what you are asking, yes you can. Goto the forum you want http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/ and click the "Replies" Link above the number of replies.

Thanks you understood perfectly the first thing I was saying. Indeed you can sort them, but it's only interesting to bring the zeros to the top if you can somehow "vote off" the stupid questions that dont deserve an answer. Like when I sorted them there were tons of zeros and the first few I looked at were alll stupid questions. so the real feature I proposing is rate how good a question this is with 0 being doesn't deserve an answer.

You can rate a thread, and that rating will show in the listing. Maybe use that somehow.

It's usually pointless to reply to a post more than a few days old. In most forums you can scan the first page of replies and see what's new that hasn't been answered. Also, because a post has a response doesn't mean it's been adequately answered. I'd pay more attention to new posts than unanswered ones. Old ones that got no replies usually have insufficient info or are too specific to a scenario not described to reply with anything more than "please clarify"

I think rating requires more than one person to rate for it to show a rating.

indeed. and I suppose if I post up a really tough question I would at least get a notification if anyone answered it even if it was several days later.
And there's always the bump as long as people don't abuse it. But sometimes when looking for a question to answer I am trying to find an interesting one that is answerable and that no one has answered yet. and I would reply to a slightly older post if it was a hard question I knew the answer to.