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I've seen my share of downvoted and closed questions from others, and often it comes down to users expecting the site to adapt to their needs rather than realiz
by bmitch3020 9y ago
I've seen my share of downvoted and closed questions from others, and often it comes down to users expecting the site to adapt to their needs rather than realizing they are a guest on someone else's site. SO doesn't exist to be your personal support site where others are obligated to help you on your terms.
When you're a guest, you follow their rules. And their rules are fairly simple:
- Stay on topic
- Don't duplicate existing questions (look before you ask)
- Ask a specific question ("how do I fix it?" is not a specific question)
- Be polite (no one is getting paid to answer your question)
- Don't be a spammer (and avoid looking like a spammer)
With coding questions, it really helps to:
- Reduce the problem to a specific detail and be concise, if I haven't finished reading the question and have an idea of the answer in 30 seconds, I move on.
- Provide enough detail that someone else could reproduce your issue. So many people assume I have remote access to their laptop, not to mention what they are thinking inside their head.
- Write it in English, with punctuation, and capitalization. If there's a 10 line block of text without a single capital letter or period, I move on. Same goes for anyone with their capslock key stuck in the on position. I try my best to understand non-native English speakers, because I sure can't talk in their language, but sadly when there's a language barrier, I move on fairly quickly.
- nix0n 9y agoI understand that SO's rules prohibit "what is the best tool for this job?" type questions. Yet, a closed SO question is almost always the first Google result. What is the correct place to find this type of info?
- JamesBarney 9y agoI would really like to know this information. Stack overflow at one point was the most useful software site on the planet. I stopped using Google back in 2011 because everything I ever wanted was there. But since they decided to nix 95% of the useful questions I rarely go there anymore.
- mark-r 9y agoMy understanding is that those questions are disallowed for two reasons: one, they devolve into a kind of popularity contest, and two, the answers get stale faster than most others. But I'm with you, they can be incredibly informative and helpful. It took a while for those types of questions to fall out of favor, so the ones you find through Google invariably date back to when the site was fresh.
- IshKebab 9y agoI agree it is stupid. There are other stack exchange sites but it takes about 5 minutes to read through their FAQs to work out where to go - Software Enginering? Superuser? Nope you need Software Recommendations. Obviously. A tiny meta-site where nobody will ever see your question. Why do they need to separate clearly popular and related questions onto a graveyard site? Sure they might go stale quicker, but I have a load of questions and answers from Android 2ish that are totally irrelevant now and they are allowed to stay apparently. Stack overflow doesn't have any solution for any answers going stale so I don't think they should use that as a reason to pick on questions that pretty much everyone except the pedantic editors think are fine.
- nix0n 9y agoThank you IshKebab, https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ is the answer I was looking for.
- dredmorbius 9y agoOne option might be to set closed questions to no-index.