Are questions going to be closeable? What criteria would be used?
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One of the key features of Stack Exchange and answers.onstartups.com was that off-topic or poor questions could be closed by voting. I'll refrain from saying my personal opinion about that, but I'm curious to know if Bright Journey is going that way as well.
As of right now, there are no features for closing something as off-topic, not a real question, or even as a duplicate.
As of right now, people have been willing to answer just about any question that comes through the system, though to be fair, we haven't seen anything that's too far off track.
What did the site creators envision in this aspect? What do the users of the site envision in this aspect?
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Great question RB! One of the things that I feel is important in any community is to allow all types questions -- no matter how basic or advanced they are. Someone just venturing into their journey of becoming an entrepreneur might have some *really* basic questions that most might view as common sense. As such we didn't make any functionality to "close" questions per se. We figured down-voting a completely off-topic and spammy question would be the way to go. If a question gets a certain threshold of downvotes, it gets buried automatically. I'd love to hear everyone's view on this.
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Nishank Khanna
10 years ago
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This is one of the things we do very differently from SE. I felt allowing moderators to close questions without input from the community at large scares new people away. Since we're still growing, we haven't yet faced any major spam issues. Once we do, I'm sure we can come up with a programmatic way of handling spam -- giving one person the power to decide for the entire community doesn't feel like a democracy or an inviting place to share ideas. Again, I'd love to hear yours and everyone else's opinion on this.
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Nishank Khanna
10 years ago
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An anecdote: Back in 1999 when I was still in high school, I remember posting a really "dumb" question about HTML on Webmaster Resources (now SitePoint). The people there helped point me in the right direction regardless. That resulted in my continued participation in their community and I eventually learnt the ropes. Had they closed my question, I would have hit the back button and tried to find another community to be part of.
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Nishank Khanna
10 years ago
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I'm completely in agreement with you on this, personally. In fact, one of my biggest complaints about SE as a whole is that five users can close a question when 30 people have upvoted it. Yes, it could be reopened, but it never is (unless somebody makes a stink about it on meta). So put my vote in the camp of not really having questions be closeable. Yeah, spam will eventually be a problem, but like you said, there's a different way to deal with spam.
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rbwhitaker
10 years ago
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Another thing we should keep in mind is that there are many successful people in this world from all walks of life who don't necessarily speak english as their primary language. If they can get their point across, regardless of their grammar and spelling, they should be welcomed here with open arms.
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Nishank Khanna
10 years ago
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@rb, glad we agree! :)
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Nishank Khanna
10 years ago
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Right on!
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Bruce Schwartz
10 years ago
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Some questions can be categorized as "lazy". Leaving them unanswered makes for a bad neighborhood aka broken windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory). Simply pushing out a lmgtfy.com at them can also be interpreted as hostile. How would you suggest addressing them?
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Jim Galley
10 years ago
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Good question Jim. What do you think about these as a way to reduce "lazy" questions: (1) Suggest the user to possibly add more details if the length is too short. (2) If a question is shorter than a threshold, show the user a list of possible duplicates BEFORE posting their question (i.e. "Do any of these answer your question?"). (3) Ability for people to flag a question as "requires more details" -- which would trigger an alert to the asker so they can edit.
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Nishank Khanna
10 years ago
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Another thing we could implement: Suggested Answers. When a user posts a question and it hasn't been answered yet, show a list of possible answers that would work (contextually matched from all other answers on the site).
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Nishank Khanna
10 years ago
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Good ideas. Short questions sometimes are good ones - so I don't know if I would filter by length. Having a list of possible duplicates prior to posting is a great idea. Also allowing the community to flag questions as "incomplete / needs more info" is good - but I would make sure that the community member has sufficent rep to reduce abuse.
The "suggested answers" approach would be great if you can make it work - the related function does provide some of this, but not the specific answers (and a bit too broad, IMHO).
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Jim Galley
10 years ago
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Two possible down side to allowing "lazy" questions, are: 1) that users sometimes don't like the answers they receive. I don't find it particularly interesting to answer what boils down to be: "should I talk to potential customers?" for the 100th time, less so if I receive a downvote afterwards.
2) some/many of the lazy questions come from those with low karma counts - we have no way of knowing in advance whether they are drive-bys or stick arounds.
Ignoring these questions seems counter productive - but how to handle them?
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Nick Stevens
10 years ago
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@Nick We're building out the Suggested Answers feature. It should fix some of these issues -- as questions that have been answered before will automatically get the best "suggested answer" with a reference to the original question.
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Nishank Khanna
10 years ago
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