How to improve our style for reacting on "low quality questions"?

Question

The last week we had seen (again) some discussions here what is "wrong" with this site, why are here so many closed and downvoted questions and why people are interpreting this as "hostility" and "unhelpfulness". Peter Tòmas Scott made some kind of survey, and his final suggestions were

1. Improve communication of the site's purpose.

2. Change the self-moderating style

The first topic was already adressed here by an attempt of Rachel to get permission for changing the site's name. My question is: how can we address the second point (which is IMHO the more important one)?

Will it improve the sites' perception if we try to improve our means of communication, being more polite, less terse, using the "downvote" button less often against newbies (even when we suggest to close a question), and so on? Let me show you some examples for questions which were closed and/or downvoted in the last 12 hours:

1. I add dynamically dropdown and input fields rows using Jquery
2. reading line from text files in java (netbeans)
3. What's wrong about thos code
4. While loops in C# for Windows Forms. I'm trying to loop certain coefficients so that they can keep displaying on certain labels

Should we not have a more polite comment template for these kind of "fix-my-code" requests? Like "Hi OP, are you aware that these kind of questions are off-topic on this site? ...".

Moreover, these are a new users, can't we just close those questions instead of giving them a ton of additional downvotes?

5. Should filenames be relative to their directory name?

Ok, this is primarily opinion-based. But a downvote, and those precanned links? What about enclosing the link into somethink like "Hi XYZ, are you aware that your question is probably too oppionated to let someone give you a good answer, see for more information"?

6. What should I know to create applications in Phoenix Webframework?

This is IMHO a much better example of how the closing should happen, a comment which was detailed enough to get a "thanks" respond from the OP.

7. Registration form with email verification
8. Integrate between PHP and C program

The comments below those question are fine, and the questions are not yet closed. But the downvotes? The questions are not badly written or expect the reader to have a glass-bowl. And what about a friendly comment like "Hi OP, are you aware that questions of this type are often downvoted or closed on this site if they do not show that the asker did some research effort before"

9. Rejected by recruitment process on bad code review

Closed as "unclear" after it got a long-winded answer with 4 upvotes? Sorry, just because for some of us the question seemed to be unanswerable, others seemed to have a different opinion - and that was obvious at the time of closing. There must be a better way to deal with such questions.

10. If condition vs variable assignment performance wise

Closed as a dupe (that is debatable, my close vote would have been for a different reason), but 5 downvotes? The question was clearly written and from a newbie. There must be a better way to handle this.

And finally, a more positive one:

11. Is it ok if I can't solve a problem when sitting in front of a computer?

Correctly closed, because this was not programming specific, and surely too opinionated. But it got lots of comments and upvotes before (still those 3 IMHO unneccessary downvotes). So that is IMHO a much more constructive way of closing a question.

So, what do you think about this?

EDIT: Here is another one I would like to add for demonstration purposes:

12. Quartz .net does not work when I inject dependency

Why not use a more friendly comment like "Hi SlashMet, are you aware that we have a strict no-crosspost policy here in the stackexchange network? Please delete one of your doubles, or expect the community to downvote and close both of your questions." Of course, that question would be closed either because it is a "fix-my-code" request, and it would surely make sense to tell the OP that, too.

Answer 1

Having worked as a freelancer for years, I hope I can bring a useful comparison between working with customers and answering questions on Stack Exchange. This may eventually be redundant with other answers, but I'll try to make my view more illustrative.

Any company, including freelancers, are faced with bad customers—the ones who will spend time jerking about the product you delivered, behaving unprofessionally and trying to screw you and get your work for free. With experience, it becomes easy to spot some of those customers from the beginning of the project, and so you start looking at ways to get rid of those people. Those ways vary from a simple “Sorry, you're a jerk and I won't work for you” to screwing the project to lawsuits to extremely diplomatic ways to explain them that you may not be the best freelancer/company for their project.

When things go bad and you know that it will go even worse, it's easy to throw the customer away by shouting at him by phone or by sending him an e-mail telling that you're fed up with his unprofessional crap. It's much more difficult to remain perfectly diplomatic and professional yourself and lead the customer decide that he should develop the current/next project by somebody else, not because you suck, but for any reason which preferably seem unrelated with your relations between the customer and you.

So why would it matter to be diplomatic? It's not for the customer. You know that this customer won't bring you any money. Actually, he costs you money and make you miserable, and it won't change. But you do it for the image of your company—a disgruntled customer can do a lot of harm, such as posting publicly the e-mail you sent him where you told him that his project sucks.

Stack Exchange is different: here, all we do, we do it publicly. Comments are public. This discussion is public. It's like if all e-mails and all phone conversations with customers were public, so any potential customer could read and listen those and make an opinion about the company.

The quality of questions like I add dynamically dropdown and input fields rows using Jquery or What's wrong about thos code is a good indicator that we don't want those people on Programmers.SE. If they leave angry at our community and never come back, it's not that had. Many of them won't learn how to ask questions correctly, because they simply don't care. They don't care either about the fact that they are also talking to real people, and plz send teh codez and do my homework for me style questions are not particularly polite in the first place.

The problem, instead, is that other potentially valuable users may come to our site, see those questions and the way they are treated here, and make a negative opinion about the community of Programmers.SE. This is where the actual problem lies.

I can suggest two solutions to that.

• Be welcome and polite to everyone, including the authors of plz send teh codez questions.

  The issue I can see with this solution is that when this happens, it usually ends up with a discussion. You explain to the person that this is not a good place for such questions, and the OP answers something like: “I don't care about all this meta stuff. Just answer my question.” This could easily lead to not so kind comments and more downvotes.

• Make the question disappear from the home page. What if the rules which make the question appearing on the home page were different? Such as two close votes and one moderator flag from high rep users make the question immediately vanish for users with low reputation?

  I think it would not only solve the public image of unfriendliness problem, but also make the content more attractive to newcomers (and Google). Meanwhile, high rep users will still see those partially-closed questions and decide whether they are worth being edited/improved/commented, or downvoted/closed/flagged/deleted.

Answer 2

My experience on other Stack Exchange sites with similar levels of subjectivity (namely The Workplace) is that people generally want to ask questions that are on topic.

People generally respond well to significant rewrites that capture the essence of the question. I have done this many times on Workplace and occasionally here, and when you leave a comment like, "I've made a large edit to your question to clarify it, if that changed your intent too much feel free to [edit] to clarify!" almost never receive a negative reaction.

I'm demoralized from making edits here, because:

• It feels like no one really wants to reopen questions (this includes people who want to make the site more friendly - in fact people in this category are precisely the people who I think need to participate more in site moderation!)
• Many questions here cannot be rewritten this way given lack of information from OP
  • Or are blatantly off topic, like the implementation questions
  • Some level of "what are you trying to do and why" is required to rewrite a question
• It's a ton of work to make a comprehensive edit compared to VtC
  • When you have limited time for community moderation, VtC >> comprehensive edits

Additionally, canned comments containing links are really not useful at all, especially since nearly all close reasons contain links to the same pages.

And last, related to overall morale:

• People here seem to prefer telling others what to do about how to make the site better than making edits, placing constructive comments, voting (reopen/upvote/etc) themselves, flagging comments which are "not constructive" or too direct towards new users (use the custom flag if it's a marginal one - trust me as a mod elsewhere, that helps immensely)

Any person here who wants to improve the site culture can do so. The problem is that it certainly feels like many (most?) people do not seem to want to do things themselves, but instead tell the others what to do.

It's hard to spend time finding the diamonds when you are shoveling the... crap. There are a lot of people who have the ability to vote to close/delete questions which are clearly offtopic. If everyone was actively doing this (such as all the implementation questions), I think the overall site community would improve as everyone would have more bandwidth to help edit broken questions.

Answer 3

There's a million angles one could look at this issue from, so here's how I'm interpreting the question:

Assuming our scope and our quality standards do not and should not change, how can we minimize negativity when enforcing that scope and those standards? That includes negative reactions from the asker, and from anyone who views the question before, during or after the "enforcement" takes place.

The big question here is what parts of our "enforcement" elicit negative reactions. It could be downvotes. It could be close votes. It could be the lack of an answer. It could be the canned comments. It could be the non-canned comments explaining why the question can't/shouldn't be answered. It may be unwillingness to nominate some other site as the next place to go when doing these things.

For the most part, the only evidence we have to go on is what people complain about in the comments on these questions, and occasionally in rants here on meta.

In my experience, these are the things I have seen people directly complain about, and what (if anything) I think could be improved there:

• Downvoting without an explanation. These comments seem to happen mostly on questions which are on-topic but judged to be too broad or opinion-based. Personally, when I down or close vote, I will usually write a comment explaining the problem if such a comment does not already exist (unless it's exceptionally lazy or just blatantly off-topic). I can understand others not doing this, as these are usually things we've explained a million times before and very few OPs even attempt to fix the question, much less fix it successfully. But despite that, I believe it's worth encouraging more people to write these comments more often, and avoid down or close voting on questions which do not have such a comment if they are unwilling to write one themselves. It's also worth noting most of my downvotes are intended solely to get poor questions off the front page before they get poor answers, which is a behavior I think many people share, and I'm open to rethinking it since poor questions getting poor answers no longer seems to be our biggest problem.

• Voting to close a question. This is relatively uncommon simply because most OPs lack the ability to see close votes. But it does happen, and when it does it's usually for too broad/POB votes. As I recently said in chat, I believe those are the most controversial close reasons, and the most abused (where "abuse" means closing questions that do not need to be closed at all), so I have personally decided to not use those close reasons on any question I believe could get a useful answer, unless it has already gotten multiple bad answers to prove otherwise.

• Refusing to answer a question the OP believes is answerable. This happens on all types of close-worthy questions, from recommendations to broad/POB to debugging. I haven't noticed these comments being more or less common depending on whether the question is getting downvotes, close votes or canned comments. I take this to mean many askers are here solely to get their question answered, and don't care about any other form of response they get. There's not much we can do in these cases, since answering these questions (even in the form of a comment) is equivalent to changing the scope of the site, and that's a discussion for another meta thread.

• Canned comments. While I've never seen an OP specifically accuse these comments of being unhelpful, these seem to increase the probability of a follow-up comment complaining about unexplained downvotes or our refusal to answer the question. I have never used canned comments, and in my experience, every time an asker reacted non-negatively after an "enforcement comment" was posted (either by quietly self-deleting or by writing a positive/neutral reply) it was a non-canned comment that did it. The meta posts we like to link to are definitely useful (as evidenced by other sites starting to use them), but I believe our comments must contain some handwritten content before the recommended reading link to ensure a positive outcome.

• Accusatory or rude comments. Although I hate making ad hominem attacks, and don't want to imply any of this site's problems can be blamed entirely on a single user, we can't talk about negativity on this site without addressing the elephant in the room. gnat is the only P.SE user who very frequently posts comments questions which directly accuse the asker of "spamming", "dumping", evading a question ban, ignoring previous warnings or otherwise being deliberately malicious. He is also one of only two users I've ever seen referred to by name multiple times on multiple sites by disgruntled users as a major source of negativity and frustration. While I agree with the majority of his downvotes and close votes, and his targets are almost always legitimately bad posts, the rudeness simply has to stop. It's not encouraging newbies to follow the rules; it's encouraging them to hate the rules and the "cabal" that enforces them.

In my experience, these are things I have almost never seen people directly complain about:

• Handwritten non-accusatory comments. These sometimes prompt the OP to seek loopholes in our policies or argue about what our scope should be rather than address the problem directly, but they never seem to increase the amount of negativity in the thread unless other factors such as speedy downvotes and rude/canned comments are already in play. The exception is when the OP responds, but doesn't really "get it" and a lengthy but unproductive comment discussion ensues. This is why I normally stick to one explanatory comment per question, even when the OP does respond to me, and it seems like most of the people who write these comments already tend to do the same.

• Anything we do to a "code dump" question. Most of these are "drive-by" OPs who we never hear from again, so the fact that they're usually getting quickly closed and downvoted off the front page is probably a good thing.

• Suggesting other sites the OP could ask on. There is a "your princess is in another castle" argument to be made here, and it's been suggested that even providing this level of help encourages repeat offenders (which I personally doubt), but I've never seen OPs complain about us redirecting a question instead of answering it ourselves.

Answer 4

I absolutely agree that we need to be more welcoming. This is something that all of us who actively curate and moderate the site need to be more cognizant about. I am going to quote from our own help center.

Be nice

1. Rudeness and belittling language are not okay. Your tone should match the way you'd talk in person with someone you respect and whom you want to respect you. If you don't have time to say something politely, just leave it for someone who does.

I believe our weakness is we can be too terse when dealing with new users. Commenting with a canned link with no other explanation is one example. We may not use rude language per se, but some users are clearly interpreting our terseness as being rude. Suck up your pride buttercup, we the 3k+ regular users are the ones that need to change our attitude, not the "omg lolz gimme teh codez" newbie posters.

As a military NCO, as a civilian manager, as a person who has had to deal with angry customers, I have had many people in my face and angry for a variety of reasons. Being rude, terse, or belittling is not a solution to the problem. We need to be calm, professional, and to move the situation to a positive result even when others are not interested in working with us toward that goal. If a new user is confused, upset at a comment, does not understand how to edit their question, someone needs to make an effort to help.

This dovetails nicely into the next point:

2. Be welcoming, be patient, and assume good intentions. Don't expect new users to know all the rules — they don't. And be patient while they learn. If you're here for help, make it as easy as possible for others to help you. Everyone here is volunteering, and no one responds well to demands for help.

There is a key there: do not expect new users to know all the rules. While we have seen a thousand off-topic, too broad, POB questions, new users have not. We already know that while the help center and tour are good resources, expecting every new user to read and understand those resources is a pipe dream. We need to help guide them in the right direction, rather than assume the worst. The guidance above says to assume good intentions. Rather than assume anything, let the new user prove whether they are here to make positive contributions or to troll or spam. There is an old saying about giving someone rope to hang themselves: let the user choose what to do with the rope and let us assume the best until proven otherwise.

3. Don't be a jerk. These are just a few examples. If you see them, flag them:

I omitted the list of obvious stuff. I do not believe we have an issue with being jerks to new users, other than the terseness mentioned above.

What topics can I ask about here?

Programmers Stack Exchange is a Q&A site for professionals and students in software development and related fields who are interested in getting expert answers on conceptual questions about software development.

Before showing the list of what is on-topic, the first thing we encounter on that page is our intended audience.

Most of us regulars fall into the professionals in software development. We have graduated college, worked in our profession for several years to several decades, and know quite a bit. There is a reason we are the ones with high rep: we have the knowledge and experience to make many positive contributions to the site.

On the flip side, students are also included. While our profession is unique in that we have many brilliant, self-taught individuals, not everyone is like that. We need to expect that there will be students who fall at both ends of two spectrums: skill level and educational coursework. We may receive questions from people who are in semester one of freshman year, or who are at the graduate level. We may receive question from people who are really good or really bad at software development. We need to welcome everyone and be patient with those who need a little extra handholding.

On Canned Comments

The canned comments and links have come up a few times. I wanted to focus on this specific aspect a little bit.

We see a lot of the same problems over and over again. Rather than typing the same guidance over and over, it makes sense to collect it in a meta post and link to that meta post. We get consistency that way, and questions and answers can be much, much longer than a comment.

I do not advocate for stopping the canned comments and meta links. But I do agree with the point several people brought up that we need to personalize them more. One of the examples Doc Brown brought up in this meta question was mine: I linked to a meta post with all the details about why the question was off-topic, then I explained what the user needs to do. While answering questions in comments is not what Stack Exchange wants us to do, I felt that saying "nope, sorry, can't ask that here" was too jerkish. I will break down what I feel any comment explaining an off-topic or broad/POB/unclear question must do:

1. Provide a link to a meta post that goes into more detail about why the question is not appropriate.

2. Provide a brief explanation of the deficiency in this specific question. If I ask a question that is going to be closed, I want to know how I can improve it. While the meta link may wax poetic about various problems, I might not know how it applies to my specific question.

3. For off-topic questions, end with a note saying "while this question is off-topic, if you later encounter conceptual or design issues, those may be on-topic questions for this site."

I strongly advocate against suggesting that a user may be trying to circumvent a question block on Stack Overflow, or stating that a user has recently asked multiple poor-quality questions, even if there is evidence for it.

The only exception would be one from a few days ago. MichaelT told a user that he had asked several poor-quality questions and may receive a temporary question ban. He offered guidance about how to improve the questions and avoid a question ban. I cannot find the link to his comment right now but the point is he was being positive and constructive, trying to help the user avoid an unpleasant situation.

Conclusion

The main takeaway from all of this is that we need to do a better job of guiding new users toward making positive contributions to this community. This will require stepping up our professionalism to the next level and investing more time curating questions beyond close/down votes and canned comments. If we show new users that we care, those new users are more likely to return the sentiment and be positive contributors to Programmers.SE.

Answer 5

Specifically regarding downvoting, one important observation is that when viewing the homepage questions that are -4 or lower are not visible.

I do not know how many people view this link, but given how often bumped content of mine receives upvotes across the SE network, I suspect quite a few do.

Additionally, questions that are -3 or lower can be deleted immediately by 20,000 trusted users:

Voting to delete questions with a score of -3 or lower immediately after they are closed

Answer 6

I think what gets forgotten is that while long-time users have seen thousands of "do my homework" requests and hundreds of rants disguised as questions, people coming to the site for the first site haven't. For them, their introduction to the site is the first few questions they see. If they response to questions seems impolite, flippant or rude in the first five questions they see, those will probably be the last five questions they see.

And some of those people are potentially valuable contributors.

When you act on a question, you are not speaking to the OP. You are speaking to everyone who visits the site.

And yes, it is hard to keep a polite view after the fifteenth conceived, poorly spelled garbage question, but if we really want to make the sit welcoming to new users, that's exactly what people will have to do. No, it isn't easy, and speaking personally I often don't have the time or inclination to put that much work in myself. So in a real sense, I am speaking to the contributors who have more time, and more energy for this site than I do, and saying:

If you don't have the energy to close and describe the reason...you don't have the energy to close. It is better to make fewer "high quality" close votes than many "drive by" closes.

Obviously no one's going to care if two line, ungrammatical piece of garbage gets closed immediately. But every question deserves as much care in close votes as went in to the asking. If someone obviously spent a lot of time putting together a question, then it deserves real attention when closed even if it is clearly wrong for the site.

As a concrete suggestion, I suggest adding new canned "close vote" reasons:

• Rant disguised as a question
• Do my homework request

Finally, not wanting to point to any particular users, but you should be very careful of saying "possible duplicate" in comments. It smacks of looking for reasons to downvote. We should not be looking for reasons to downvote. Instead, it should be either downvoted as a duplicate (if it is) or phrased as a helpful comment, like "Hey, you might want to check out this other question, which may help you".

We want people to think we're trying to help them rather than looking for an excuse to boot them.

Answer 7

Apart from the politeness aspect which is covered already (and I would assume to be a standard for all users here), I would like to say that helping users who have posted here against the site's purpose is probably of paramount importance.

If a new user comes across Programmers and thinks "a site for programmers, I'm a programmer, I have a question about my code that's not working" and posts a question that should be on SO, we should simply help them along by migrating it to SO. No need for a downvote, no need for comments, just pass it on and leave link saying "this should have been posted over here, we've moved it for you. Please read the site's FAQ".

This doesn't necessarily apply to SO though, there are many questions that should be moved to Workplace or Security or DBAs.

I think we need better tools to manage this kind of process. Maybe a "should be moved to a different SE site" is all that's needed, and a a mod can manually decide which and move it on (if direct options are not available).

This would be efficient, and helpful to the new users without telling them they did wrong - just put them right and let them continue. I think people would respond happily to that, particularly if the question they asked then started to get answers from a more appropriate home.

Answer 8

The elephant in the room is that the possibility of a negative score is itself the problem. We are in the main, technical people but I do try to make a point of researching soft skills to make myself a more rounded professional (doughnuts help).

A tome written long ago by Dale Carnegie has this to say about people:

• They liked to be praised
• They hate being criticised

Note this is about people in general - not just IT professionals who are sometimes dubbed as lacking inter-personal skills (as if!).

So - my suggestion: Do away with negative scores. They serve no purpose whatsoever and are a constant source of ill feeling and bickering.

If you enter an exam room and totally mess it up - your net result is zero. It has served us well for centuries - let's bring zero back!

Rather than a negative score, convert the downvotes into flags underneath the score that has a tally of people who think this question could be improved.

Problem. Solved.

Will this happen? I seriously doubt it.