Asking Better Questions
As Stack Overflow has grown, it has started to have some decidedly big city problems. The one we are most concerned about is an influx of very low quality questions.
While we still believe in editing and improving low-quality questions to make them better, there’s a fundamental mismatch in scale and effort here — bad questions, asked in bad faith, have a tendency to overwhelm the good intentions of the average Stack Overflow user. So, we’ve decided to take some steps to block bad questions before they enter our system, and save everyone some effort.
Every new Stack Overflow user with <= 10 reputation is now presented with a mandatory “How To Ask” page that they must click through before asking their first question. The text on this page is a heavily edited subset of Google’s excellent Tips for Getting Help.
At this point, you’re probably wondering — did Jeff really just tell me that Stack Overflow now requires every new user to agree to a EULA before asking their first question? Why, yes. Yes I did. Do let me explain the apparent madness.
Unlike a EULA, our How to Ask page is …
-
short, simple, readable language.
-
designed to help you, not lawyers — by teaching you how to ask a decent question that gets the best possible answers!
- mercifully brief; it’s 5 simple rules that fit on a single page with no scrolling.
Now, whether or not new users will actually read this, I cannot say.
From my perspective, if at least one in ten new users read it and think, “hey, I should at least try to form a decent question” — it’s a win. If some very poor questions are discarded based on seeing this page — it’s a win. And honestly, when you have 2k+ new questions per day, you can afford to throw a few away in the name of increased overall quality.
Furthermore, this page is designed to be shared and reusable. Free to share the How to Ask link with any question asker in need of advice on how to improve their question.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/how-to-ask
Beyond this, we’re also starting to actively block questions from IPs and accounts that have historically produced a lot of low-quality questions.
The details of this algorithm have to be kept vague, because we don’t want people to game it or exploit it. Remember all those question votes you thought were so meaningless? You might want to reconsider that stance. The rationales for voting on questions haven’t changed, though:
-
if you see a great, thoughtfully asked, well researched question, vote it up — please! Great questions are an art!
-
if you see an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended question that you feel was asked in bad faith … vote it down.
- anything in between that’s salvageable, edit it — or suggest an edit if you lack the 2,000 reputation to edit outright.
We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. If, after a few fair attempts, you haven’t been able to prove that your contributions to Stack Overflow make it at least … not-worse … then we reserve the right to refuse your questions. If we don’t do our part to cull the bad questions, then we risk alienating the true experts who provide what really matters: the answers!
For now, these measures are (mostly) only enabled on Stack Overflow, as it’s the only site large enough to have these big city problems at the moment. But we certainly hope all of our Stack Exchange network sites get large enough to run into this .. what’s the cliche, again? “nice problem to have?”
13 Comments
Hello,
Thank you for making such a useful community where we can get answers of the unsolved questions.
Since my account is blocked just because I kept asking question which was unresolved by the answers.
This move is really discouraging for a new developer of web technology. As I’m from CRM technology and this is very first time I have working on web technology. I was stuck somewhere and now my account is blocked just because I kept asking my unresolved question.
I hope my feedback will be considered.
SAME HERE MY ACCOUNT ALSO BAN.even i don’t ask stupid questions. stack overflow policy ruins my trust from this now.'
This move is really discouraging for a new developer of web technology. As I’m from CRM technology and this is very first time I have working on web technology. I was stuck somewhere and now my account is blocked just because I kept asking my unresolved question.
please don’t use BOT for checking the gudlines for the question. I never asked any stupid questions from my account but you BAN my ID for asking question.
please review my account personally i am dam sure you can’t find any stupid question.
Well, Hello, but really disappointed by the other expert users who downvote for the questions of newcomers. I am unable to understand people can’t understand the question and just downvote it. What the bullshit they are doing. If they can’t answer the question, it doesn’t mean that they downvote for others. One simple thing if I didn’t find any suitable answer from search engines and asked here, few peoples who are experts instead of answering it just downvote it because actually they also don’t know the answer. One more thing, I am unable to ask the question. The reason because experts are just here to demotivate newcomers and no need to unban me. I am not going to use this service again because experts who think they are better, once they were also newcomers
Answering other guys with useful questions will unblock me from asking questions again ?
hello , how i became could not ask any question anymore please explain to me what i should do ,
and if there is no hope do i have to create new account on stack ?
Am not getting how to resolve this?
Is that my mistake my question is not getting answered enough?. The question I asked was about pjsip library and this library used by very few developers. Please grant me the privilege of asking questions.
I think you need to redesign this feature. Recently I got some down votes just because the code in the question had some bad practices. Which has nothing to do with the question. Question was 100% in correct format.
People are abusing downvoting just because they do not like something in the question.
And in some cases I think people down votes because they do not realy understand what is the actual question.
Have you considered cases where the post is not bad, but the system bans the user anyway? You might say that there is a reason for the system to do so, but have you ever thought that this system, while trying to reduce poor questions for the better, is hindering many others from learning just because they don’t reach a certain score, doing worse than planned? For example, I have several posts which I learned a lot from people and I thought I was going to trust this place to learn more, but for some reason the system detects that my posts are not ‘up to standard’. Besides the ban, I was reading some comments on other posts and I have questions and wanted to comment on the spot but the system says I don’t have the sufficient ‘reputation’ to do so. The managers of this website must seriously consider feedback and the unintended consequences of this ‘merit’ system. Your narrow objective of ‘making this place better’ made you forgot parts of the community especially those who are trying to learn but couldn’t get the chance because of some algorithm. Think about it: poor posts can be easily screened off. Banning people from asking reasonable questions, imposing conditions for this and that, is defeating the purpose of why this place is set up in the first place.
Whats wrong with questions! i don’t know but it’s really very bad cause asking questions is banned ! is there any way to unban it? I am a newcomer !
Please enable asking a question from my account.