As people with more than 500 rep, who have the ability to close questions, are we being too generous? Barely anything is closed, unless it’s spam. Now, at Stack Overflow (and other similar sites), loads more questions are closed, for being duplicates, bad, etc. I think that we need to be slightly more vicious, to try and get people to have better habits.
(Also, it’d be nice to have a meta?)
I agree with Peter, BUT I also agree with the OP. We are way too generous in general. There needs to be a much more general policing of questions/answers. Perhaps by assigned moderators. I can only speak for myself, but I know that my interest in this site has waned considerably in the past month… mainly because I get tired of seeing the same poorly worded questions every single day- and it seems to get worse and worse.
I kind of feel like UA is on a downward spiral in terms of quality. There will be a saturation point for all of this, and the professionals who have the answers are going to jump ship. A lot of my colleagues have already done so- and whenever I mention UA they make remarks like “how do i make collishun?” or “how 2 make sumthin hapen when i press button”. And they’re absolutely right in their criticism.
If we want to have a stronger roster of intelligent professionals who are on hand to answer real questions, we need to take a low/zero tolerance policy to crap questions that can easily be answered with a simple UA search, google search, or (gasp) reading the effing manual.
I’m all for helping out ‘the noobs’, but not at the expense of the community’s collective intelligence. If we cater to the lowest common denominator, before too long it will be the blind leading the blind because most everybody else will be gone.
Here’s a typical day at UA, and one of the reasons why I haven’t been posting lately:
I have multiple issues with the current set up of closing questions, and have emailed support with my opinion.
Now back to your question. The Unity community is growing so fast that we are bound to get new members constantly. The pain for me is can I answer the question faster than I can find the duplicate and link to it in the question. And most of the time the answer is yes. A quick script is usually faster for me to write, and they get the answer more easily. So call me lazy, but its easier for me to answer the question then find a duplicate and redirect the OP.
Maybe I have a different philosophy than everyone else, but unless a question is obvious spam or I can think of an excellent answer I’ve already seen, then i usually just answer the question. Its easier for everyone, and it works to basically pop old questions. Because sometimes it can be hard to find the answer you want in the search. Lets say there’s a great answer, but the asker was a beginner and he didn’t upvote or mark correct the answer. It would be hard to find that answer in the search because it pushes upvoted questions to the top and sometimes there’s a great answer to a bad question. Now that could be fixed with extensive editing, and my opinion on the issue might change, but for the time being, I still think there are questions that are hard to find a good answer to in the search box (even though it may be there somewhere.)
Sorry for the lengthy answer 
. Its just my opinion on the issue.
Peter G.
I agree with all this too. Qato and 5-votes and all that. What about this idea, or would it be too obtrusive:
The ‘Ask a Question’ field, in addition to suggesting previously asked questions (as it does now, and apparently widely ignored), instead of allowing Subject and Body at the same time, first just accepts Subject. That would do a UA search and maybe a Google search too, and display the results. At the bottom of that, it would say “Don’t see what you need? Ok, ask in more detail” and then accept the Body of the question. This might serve to weed-out the bulk of (OMG I’m so trying to be polite right now) let’s say noob questions that we all know are all already answered, so many times, here and in the forums.
At the very least it would relieve us from having to ask back “did you bother to Google that?” And, FWIW it seems Qato (and StackOverflow too) are pretty immediately indexed by Google, so there’s no real waiting period, even on a very recent Q&A.
Is it a coincidence, or has it got noticeably worse after the switch to Qato?
It occurs to me that there aren’t any guidelines, really, for what should or shouldn’t be closed. Hopefully the meta-site will take care of that.
Hitting karma thresholds and getting mod-type powers is one thing, getting guidance and having a community consensus on how those powers should be used is another. I mean, I’ve had to experiment on (sometimes unwilling) questions to see exactly what it is some of the new buttons I see pop up do. After figuring what they do, I still have trouble figuring out how they should be used effectively.
So I pose these questions:
I find that about roughly (In my opinion) 20% of the of users just ask a question, that could be either be solved by just typing it in Google, is way to vague to answer to really answer correctly, or is so easy it can be done with just 5 minutes of experimenting.
When one of those questions are answered with as much work and effort as possible, it doesn’t get marked correct, probably because the person either never visited the site again, or didn’t know how to mark it. I’ve answered a few questioners with many hour solutions and never even get noticed. It is quite degrading. testure is right here, because I think many of the expert Unity users won’t be using UA if this continues for many more months.
I agree with the OP, we need to be more aggressive on the closing questions. But I also think we need to make sure that the new users know how to ask a question properly. Maybe make it so that before you ask your first question, it will redirect you to the FAQ, and at the bottom is a link to actually ask your question? I know the FAQ won’t force users to ask properly, but it might increase the amount who do.
On the other hand Peter G’s idea of a “vote to close” system seems like a good idea and should not be ignored. Also, I agree that its easier to answer a quick, well-asked, re-posted question then to redirect, and it also increase the body of knowledge by making a a second reference to a question for other users out there. Though having 20 of them isn’t any more helpful than 3.
I’m not a over 1k karma user, but I’m trying to get there. And I’m still fairly new to Unity (only a year working with it). But I still think that it would be better to be more strict on the question asking.
In retrospect I think I’ve generally been mean to people that are being overly lazy.
First of all they’re not looking in
the documentation.
Then they come here and don’t use the
search function.
When they finally ask their question
it’s formatted like a txt to thr
bff…
When they get an answer maybe 1 in 10
actually marks the answer as the
answer.
It’s really getting tiresome. I’ve tried to upvote answers that reference documentation over just pasting the code they want you to provide.
After yesterday’s deluge of spam bots, I’m wondering if a good catch-all solution might be to have a minimum karma to even post in the first place…
To augment that- give a daily ‘visit bonus’ of one karma, and make the minimum karma to post a question or answer 7 karma. This could theoretically give people some time to look at the site and realize that their question is probably already answered (in addition to other things). And it could even be 3 karma (3 days) rather than 7, I’m just speculating on what would be ‘too long’- the key balance is that you don’t want people to just give up and never come back, but you also don’t want them jumping over here and posting every brainfart that emerges…
I dunno, just an idea anyway.
I don’t think so. I saw that my question was deleted. I dont get why though!