Why do so many people use Questions, Answers, and Comments incorrectly on this site?

Archived Forums Questions & Answers
1

Simple enough question.

you do realize that the question you are asking is an oxymoron as this is a discussion type question that should be asked on the forum.

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simple enough, vague, with a smidgeon of self righteousness.

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/wink @DietChugg he gets it!

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5 Answers

5
2

In answer to your question, I believe it is because so many people are first-and-only-time users who don’t know, don’t care about the guidelines. Look at the reputation level on them. Generally ‘1’

And yes, this is a forum topic, not a dev question. Therefore it should be closed IMHO but some may want to retag it as ‘meta’ or delete it completely.

3

The reason is simple: nobody tell them what to do. They think UA is like the forums, and use the answer to reply to answers and comments.

I think the best way to avoid this eternal confusion is to show a warning when somebody tries to use Answer in its own question - something like:

“You’re about to answer your own question! Are you sure? If you want to post a reply or comment, use add new comment instead.”.

I’m sure that this (together with a big and flashing add new comment button) could do the job. It would save us a lot of time telling to the newbies please, don’t use the answer box to reply, or other less polited things - not to mention the huge confusion these badly used answers create (sometimes we don’t even know to which answer add the “don’t use answers to reply” comment).

Another thing that should be improved is the code formatting button: most newcomers don’t even know it exists, and even those who know often don’t are able to get the desired results (we know that just selecting code and clicking this button doesn’t work all the times…). Maybe a warning message in that top orange strip could tell the newbie something like “Select your code and click 101-010 to format” (but the button must be working without bugs).

NOTE: By the way, I don’t even use this button anymore: I add a blank line, the < pre > tag, the code and the closing < /pre > tag. It works fine for me, but if anyone has a smarter way to do it, please share with us!

Warning about answering own question: Doesn't it? Didn't it used to in SE maybe? Seems familiar and so doable.

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can you also correct the formatting in your post so i can see which line number is which? part of your code is outside of the code formatting so isnt numbered correctly.

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4

You can’t solve UI design problems by adding warnings and detailed instructions everywhere. Read “The Design of Everyday Things”, and you’ll learn that writing “push” and “pull” on door handles is a failure of designing the handle shape.

The biggest problem here is that the page looks like a forum page. When there are already answers, it prompts “Your Answer”, which in English means exactly the same as “Your Reply”. In addition, adding comments is hidden behind a button, whereas adding an answer is direct. It’s hardly surprising the result.

So the answer is: Bad UI Design.

Blaming users for misunderstanding a UI is always wrong. As game designers, we should all know this already.

The system should know when a person is viewing his own question, and should reformat the text to say, instead, something like, "Did you find the answer yourself? Don't like the one(s) given? Then type your solution here" Or something like that anyway.

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I agree, it's really a bad user interface case - a big answer box and a minuscule comment button are really a recipe for disaster, a temptation to Murphy's laws. I still keep the warning idea, because it's easy to implement and more foolproof, but there's no doubt: UA asks for a better UI design. @DaveA's idea is good too: smart captions and titles could help a lot.

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I generally agree, but I never see this sort of thing happen at all on StackOverflow, and it did happen on the old Stack Exchange-based Unity Answers, though not as much as it does now. So there has to be something other than UI design involved, though clearly that's part of it.

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@Eric5h5 That's because SO has a huge and actively voting and reporting community. If some one answers his own question with a comment it'll be deleted in less then a minute, usually.

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Our Unity community has a different span of expertise/newbieness than does SO. I'm not aware of any ubiquitous software that has Stack Overflow in the Help menu. So yes, there are variances other than UI, but UI remains the solution - UA needs a UI tuned to it's users, which are different to SO users.

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5

to navigate the web effectively you have to learn to ignore about 70 percent of the information on a page as being a distraction “my avatar, my adverts, my real estate, my community signup preview option, etc” and try and look for just the buttons that are relevant to your use of the page.

this question and answer system works differently from all the other forums on the net, so if you have used 20 000 other forums before, and this comes up looking like a unity forum, you will use it the same as the 20 000 other forums on the net, there is no big warning page after signing in with big letters to explain the COMMENTS system, you learn that by getting nasty bad karma when you try to use this place normally.

I have high contrast letters so i didnt even see the formatting for the comment button and comment text.
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I completely agree that people are so used to ignoring advertising on web sites that they will sometimes easily overlook site content. For your other point, yes they need to improve the user experience and make the buttons more visible but as a user you forfeit the right to complain about a website's design as soon as you modify the styles like you have with your high contrast text mode.

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6

i just dont know why people do baffles me why people write stuff in the wrong places