Timeline for Community input on T-ball questions: Encourage or Discourage them?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 25, 2015 at 22:06 | comment | added | Ron Trunk | @MikePennington I respectfully disagree. Answering questions encourages. Not answering or telling them to go away discourages. I think most are interested in getting their question answered, and couldn't care less about reputation. I'm really arguing against the "we ought to do something!" idea. I believe there's little we can do. I guess I'll try to live with your downvote ;) | |
| Jun 24, 2015 at 17:35 | comment | added | Craig Constantine Mod | @RonTrunk: I think I was explicit in my "encourage!" answer; members of the community can encourage, but taking the time to up-vote (when they see fit), even if they aren't going to comment or attempt an answer. | |
| Jun 24, 2015 at 9:15 | comment | added | Mike Pennington | blanket upvoting encourages, comments antagonizing the OP discourage... I think you're making it harder than it should be | |
| Jun 24, 2015 at 3:06 | comment | added | Ron Trunk | The answer is, it depends. I'm waiting to hear how someone proposes to limit, encourage, discourage, block, promote, reject, etc, simple questions beyond what we do already. | |
| Jun 24, 2015 at 2:51 | comment | added | Mike Pennington | I could remove my downvote if you could be more explicit about answering the question, "encourage or discourage". | |
| Jun 23, 2015 at 22:55 | comment | added | Ron Trunk | @RickyBeam Yes, I agree completely. | |
| Jun 23, 2015 at 22:53 | comment | added | Ricky | The truly amateur questions: vote down, move on. (sometimes not even worth that much time) All we can do is vote (close, dup, up/down,...) and see if it settles out. I don't think we should discourage participation, but overly simple questions should be limited. | |
| Jun 23, 2015 at 22:46 | comment | added | Ron Trunk | @RickyBeam I’m perfectly happy to (and often do) tell users that their answer is only a Google search away. We can mark questions as duplicates, but someone still is going to explain one more time why we need ARP. I don’t know any way around it. | |
| Jun 23, 2015 at 22:46 | comment | added | Ron Trunk | 3) Who is going to decide what is an amateur question, and how are you going to respond? “I’m sorry, your amateurish question is not worth my time to answer.”? 4) On an open forum, you get what you get. Expecting people to somehow comport to your ideal OP is hopeless and will only make you bitter. People don’t read FAQs or EULAs or parking signs. That’s life. If you really don’t want newbie questions, don’t allow newbies to join. | |
| Jun 23, 2015 at 22:46 | comment | added | Ron Trunk | @Iain, Let me address your points one at a time: 1) I’m not suggesting “anything goes.” We already have rules and I think they work pretty well. Most really basic questions are duplicates and should be marked as such. Questions about how to connect one’s cable modem are marked off-topic. 2) Who is a professional? The girl with the title “network engineer”? The programmer whose boss said, “Fix the network”? The student who hopes to be a network engineer someday? (cont.) | |
| Jun 23, 2015 at 22:17 | comment | added | Ricky | Heh. I've spent my years doing "tech writing" (use cases, high level tech support, etc.) so I'm less incline to author various tomes on how to do various X's. But I'm perfectly happy helping people figure out their issues. The key problem with t-ball's is they show an almost criminal level of not trying to figure it out themselves. Many q's are already answered (more than once) or a two word google search away. | |
| Jun 23, 2015 at 20:59 | comment | added | user644 | From my personal experience elsewhere on the SE. if you don't hold the line, you end up overrun by easy questions and cannot find interesting professional level questions to answer in the sea of rubbish so the professionals leave and the rest is history. This SE site was set up by professionals for professionals.Why can't that remain the case? Why can't the amateur easy questions go elsewhere e.g. SuperUser ? Why does the whole internet have to sink to the lowest common denominator of cluelessness, halp! and the unwillingness to educate yourself by reading and researching? | |
| Jun 23, 2015 at 16:54 | history | answered | Ron Trunk | CC BY-SA 3.0 |