We are doing something similar to what you described, but via API due to lack of native capability. It was imperative for us that questions were answered quickly when first launched. Being a software company and having an automation/workflow part of our product we were lucky to be able to do then - even if the API to do so was tricky.

Now we’re a bit more relaxed but we don't like things going unanswered so we have a group of experts that tries to tackle unanswered questions. Its email based and here is what is generated:

This is awesome and exactly what I mean, or well close enough. Thanks for your reply! I hope this can be implemented soon.

I don't understand what you're referring to exactly, but an automated message is different from a topic-status. I get that there are options to check whether topics are new or unread, but when someone clicks on a topic and accidentally removes it from the Unread filter, then there's no way to check that and a simple automated message would prevent that topic from staying unanswered - apart from the Unanswered filter then of course. If I misinterpreted your answer wrongly, please forgive me and thanks for trying to help! 

Hi @JasonTMT! This is a great suggestion that would improve the experience for both moderators and community members, and potentially boost the metrics around “answered questions”, so thank you for sharing it! 

I see two parts of a potential solution in order to address the needs of those types of users:

• an automated reply is posted on the question to inform the author that a reminder has been sent to the moderation team
• a notification needs to be sent to the moderation team to review and address the unanswered questions, preferably with an easy way to have an overview of such topics. 

Let me know if you would like to add something or want to make these more specific. 

In the meantime, I do have one suggestion that might alleviate the pain around missing such topics if someone else opened them and are not marked anymore as ‘unread’. If you apply the filters “content type = question” and “best answer = No”, then you get a list of questions that do not have a reply marked as best answer yet. You could then save this view and you will be able to find it in your “Custom. views” list. 

 P.S.: The update above “New → Open” has been posted automatically when I changed this idea’s status to Open, which is something we do for all ideas on our community to signal that a product manager has reviewed and acknowledge the suggestion and we will be monitoring the votes and engagement on that topic. These idea statuses are meant to reflect the different stages from our product development phases.