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Are we being too generous?
As people with more than 500 rep, who have the ability to close questions, are we being too generous? Barely anything is closed, unless it's spam. Now, at Stack Overflow (and other similar sites), loads more questions are closed, for being duplicates, bad, etc. I think that we need to be slightly more vicious, to try and get people to have better habits.
(Also, it'd be nice to have a meta?)
Hi $$anonymous$$uzz. We're working on integrating the "meta space" into this skin for Unity. We'll try to finish that work shortly.
How to close messages? Can't find the option? don't we need 600 for that?
I can close them. Where you see "edit | report | more" a "close" option will show up when you have sufficient rep.
$$anonymous$$ay I ask? What is a meta space? A place where you can ask questions not related to Unity?
$$anonymous$$eta Space is for questions related to UnityAnswers rather than Unity itself. Basically, everything that is currently tagged 'meta' would migrate there. (well, that's my understanding of it anyway).
Answer by testure · Jul 15, 2011 at 03:25 PM
I agree with Peter, BUT I also agree with the OP. We are way too generous in general. There needs to be a much more general policing of questions/answers. Perhaps by assigned moderators. I can only speak for myself, but I know that my interest in this site has waned considerably in the past month.. mainly because I get tired of seeing the same poorly worded questions every single day- and it seems to get worse and worse.
I kind of feel like UA is on a downward spiral in terms of quality. There will be a saturation point for all of this, and the professionals who have the answers are going to jump ship. A lot of my colleagues have already done so- and whenever I mention UA they make remarks like "how do i make collishun?" or "how 2 make sumthin hapen when i press button". And they're absolutely right in their criticism.
If we want to have a stronger roster of intelligent professionals who are on hand to answer real questions, we need to take a low/zero tolerance policy to crap questions that can easily be answered with a simple UA search, google search, or (gasp) reading the effing manual.
I'm all for helping out 'the noobs', but not at the expense of the community's collective intelligence. If we cater to the lowest common denominator, before too long it will be the blind leading the blind because most everybody else will be gone.
Here's a typical day at UA, and one of the reasons why I haven't been posting lately:
Random 1 karma guy asks question that was asked 20 minutes ago (both questions on the front page ffs!!).
Question is answered (copy/paste from previous answer).
1 karma guy comes back and doesn't get it, decides to post comment as answer, along with a huge wall of code that is not formatted.
More explanation is given, along with a friendly note to not post comments as answers.
Okay now he gets is. Says thanks in an answer**, doesn't mark question as answered, and disappears forever.
repeat until new day
I've tried hard to make this a better place, but it feels like holding back a tsunami with a riot shield. Emulating StackOverflow's system as closely as possible will help since their system seems to work better.
This, a thousand times. The primary reasons I enjoy this site are
You can learn a lot from other people's questions
I enjoy helping people
1 has suffered as a result of the general trend toward poorly written/not-thought-out/duplicate questions.
2 has suffered because every time I answer a dupe with "have you tried searching" I die a little on the inside. Until very recently, I was a complete beginner in Unity so I identify with these new people co$$anonymous$$g in, but there's only so much I can take before saying " it".
See, you were a beginner in Unity recently- but I would wager that you never came here and posted "hey my character is falling through the ground", or something else that has been answered nine billion times.
There's a huge difference between the beginners who exhaust their options before asking a question, and the lazy people who don't bother checking the docs or google and go straight for the "Ask a question" button.
In my opinion we need more of the former, and less of the latter. Bring the beginners on, they will some day be productive members of the UA community. Lets take a harder line on the people who are trashing up the site with garbage questions. Just my two cents anyway..
I have issues with locking peoples accounts with the "closing privileges" set at the current level. I already disagree with the fact that we let people with 600 rep close questions (see my post), but giving them the ability to lock someone out of their account is a big deal. And its something I would never want someone with 600 karma to be able to do. In my $$anonymous$$d locking someone out would/should be reserved for people with at least 8k if not moderators. Because done overly much and we could stifle the growing community by cutting off new members from entering.
Peter: agreed. I don't think those privileges are to be taken lightly. They can (and will) be abused. I much prefer the idea of 'community policing' where a referendum must be reached in affairs like account closure, and again- another use for extremely high karma which would reduce (if not eli$$anonymous$$ate) the threat of mob mentality.
Answer by Peter G · Jul 15, 2011 at 02:03 PM
I have multiple issues with the current set up of closing questions, and have emailed support with my opinion.
I don't like that one person can close a question. I believe that you need few opinions to get a valid basis for closure. It's a "Vote to close" not a "Close".
Due to the fact that a single person can close a question, I feel that 500 rep is too low to be allowed to close questions. 500 rep isn't very hard to get to, and in my opinion, doesn't necessarily show that the user understand the system well enough to essentially moderate questions: not to say that there aren't people with around 500 rep who could be useful with that tool, but it is possible for people to get there without much knowledge or effort. Also since it is easier to close questions, we don't need as many people who can close questions. In my opinion the appropriate rep level is around 2k. It would be somewhat difficult to get the 2000 karma without having a decent understanding of what's going on.
Now back to your question. The Unity community is growing so fast that we are bound to get new members constantly. The pain for me is can I answer the question faster than I can find the duplicate and link to it in the question. And most of the time the answer is yes. A quick script is usually faster for me to write, and they get the answer more easily. So call me lazy, but its easier for me to answer the question then find a duplicate and redirect the OP.
Maybe I have a different philosophy than everyone else, but unless a question is obvious spam or I can think of an excellent answer I've already seen, then i usually just answer the question. Its easier for everyone, and it works to basically pop old questions. Because sometimes it can be hard to find the answer you want in the search. Lets say there's a great answer, but the asker was a beginner and he didn't upvote or mark correct the answer. It would be hard to find that answer in the search because it pushes upvoted questions to the top and sometimes there's a great answer to a bad question. Now that could be fixed with extensive editing, and my opinion on the issue might change, but for the time being, I still think there are questions that are hard to find a good answer to in the search box (even though it may be there somewhere.)
Sorry for the lengthy answer :) . Its just my opinion on the issue.
Peter G.
Totally agreed. The old system needed 5 votes and only ppl with (i guess) 2000+ rep could even vote. Besides that in the old system you don't get that much rep for each question / answer so the new system is way too "unsafe". There are a lot of people that just closes their question. I had even one that closed the question with the reason "question answered right answer selected" without any upvote or selected answer.
In short: a lot people misuse the close function frequently. Vote to close is a must-have
I have to admit, I'd rather see a vote-to-delete than a vote-to-close. Closed Questions still show up in the tags and might require retagging. (I agree, that 'question answered' is by no means a reason to close, let alone delete; I think the vote would prevent such abuse.) Greetz, $$anonymous$$y.
I was intrigued by the question of how many dupes are actually posted, and how much spam ($$anonymous$$$$anonymous$$O/Zombie/HELP $$anonymous$$E!!!!!!!!!!!) is posted everyday. So decided to spend the day not answering, but policing questions and linking dupes and such. Here's what I have discovered:
I completely look past most of the spam. I don't even bother reading questions with any thing title "Zombie" or "HELP HELP NOOB I N33D HELP BAD." So my impression of how much spam the site receives was a little low.
As far as dupes go, most of them are Zombie AI or weapon switching. Both of which I know are answered everyday, but what I was really surprised by was how hard it was to find the old answers. Searching "Switch Weapons" brings up one to two average answers on switching weapons then a lot on switching cameras and characters and everything else.
What does this mean? Well I don't really like the search algorithm that Qato uses. It just matches titles without checking the body of the question.
It isn't as easy as it sounds to find an answer to your question just by searching for it. A google search sometimes helps, but that provides equally useless information for non-Unity related sites.
Other dupes I can answer so fast it isn't worth directing them elsewhere. "When one dies they all die" if you've been around awhile, you can answer this question with your eyes closed. Remove the static keyword from the health and access the variable with GetComponent().health
Redirecting is very useful. AFAI$$anonymous$$, it deletes duplicate questions. You redirect one into the other and it deletes the first one. This lets you consolidate questions into one very thorough answer.
@Peter G: regarding google searches, you don't have to search the entire internet, you can just search a site. "`site:answers.unity3d.com switch weapons`"
Answer by DaveA · Jul 15, 2011 at 08:31 PM
I agree with all this too. Qato and 5-votes and all that. What about this idea, or would it be too obtrusive:
The 'Ask a Question' field, in addition to suggesting previously asked questions (as it does now, and apparently widely ignored), instead of allowing Subject and Body at the same time, first just accepts Subject. That would do a UA search and maybe a Google search too, and display the results. At the bottom of that, it would say "Don't see what you need? Ok, ask in more detail" and then accept the Body of the question. This might serve to weed-out the bulk of (OMG I'm so trying to be polite right now) let's say noob questions that we all know are all already answered, so many times, here and in the forums.
At the very least it would relieve us from having to ask back "did you bother to Google that?" And, FWIW it seems Qato (and StackOverflow too) are pretty immediately indexed by Google, so there's no real waiting period, even on a very recent Q&A.
That sounds like a great idea. It might not stop all of them, but it seems like it would work. The only problem would be if the subject searcher wasn't that good at finding the right question, or if the person didn't know how to phrase the title.
Another good thing about this idea is that it will remove all those "PLEASE PLEASE HELP $$anonymous$$E!!!" types of questions.
A search algorithm could look for stuff like that, or compare against all known tags (it should hit at least one). In the case of no found tags or black-list (like your example) it could additionally say "Please try to rephrase your question to be more specific"
Ins$$anonymous$$d of UA + Google search, I'd recommend directly going for Google-Custom-Unity-Search http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=002470491425767499270:iugs1ezlsfq Greetz, $$anonymous$$y.
Google Custom is cool. If it could display one section for 'UA results' and another for 'www results' (can come from anywhere) that might be extra handy cuz some stuff is answered in forums or wiki's elsewhere.
Answer by Eric5h5 · Jul 15, 2011 at 05:20 PM
Is it a coincidence, or has it got noticeably worse after the switch to Qato?
I think the switch brought on a whole bunch of technical issues that have just made it easier for poor quality questions to make it through.
Even the small things like the search box not being labelled and the FAQ being AWOL for so long can have a large effect.
I think the tags getting so cluttered is one of the issues... people get easily frustrated to search through all the 'switch', 'switched', 'switching' and so on... I have some ... uh... lengthy... thoughts on this... (sorry) ... please let me know what you think nevertheless: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/143949/tag-management-conventions-for-edditing-and-re-tag.html
No, it's not a coincidence at all. The site is broken in many subtle ways, making it hard to use, especially for newcomers. The site works in that you can ask a question and get an answer...but it feels almost like it's an expert on demand system at the moment, not an archive of knowledge. (Things like broken suggestions, broken search, broken formatting, spaces in tags, no feedback in terms of what leads to up/down votes, a mysterious rep system, no way to keep track of your questions and answers except by email or manually visiting these...etc.)
(And each time I try to edit my second paragraph, QATO helpfully throws it away... last try:) The community now spends large amounts of energy trying to compensate for system failure, and I think we have also lost a few members along the way.
Answer by Chris D · Jul 15, 2011 at 06:05 PM
It occurs to me that there aren't any guidelines, really, for what should or shouldn't be closed. Hopefully the meta-site will take care of that.
Hitting karma thresholds and getting mod-type powers is one thing, getting guidance and having a community consensus on how those powers should be used is another. I mean, I've had to experiment on (sometimes unwilling) questions to see exactly what it is some of the new buttons I see pop up do. After figuring what they do, I still have trouble figuring out how they should be used effectively.
So I pose these questions:
when should a question be closed (or voted to be closed)? - old reference guidelines
when is it appropriate to use redirect?
when should liberties be taken to improve/clarify a question/comment/answer with edits?
Here are my opinions on the questions you raise:
I only close spam or duplicates WHERE I can link them to a duplicate question. Closing a question as a duplicate then not providing the duplicate still leaves the question unanswered. That is one thing I liked about the old system was that you had to provide a duplicate to close the question.
I actually just found out about this feature this morning so I'm not real sure where you'd use it. $$anonymous$$y guess is that if the OP double posts you redirect one to the other so we don't have duel threads going.
Generally I edit to improve punctuation and fix misspellings. Or occasionally if the user doesn't know the proper term for something (example: 3D lights like spotlights that seem to fill the space. If you guessed volumetric lighting then you are correct :) ). I also think its appropriate to translate questions is one language to another and provide the translation below.