koobas.hobune.stream
[META] Answering without publishing Questions
Can someone explain to me why there are moderators that answer questions through the comments in the moderation queue but don't publish the Questions to be seen by everyone? It seems to me like all it does is allow them to get a head start on questions and not let any one else get the karma for it.
Moderators: If you provide an answer in the form of a comment on a question in the moderation queue, can you please publish it and not let it sit there for some other moderator to approve?
It just prevents other people from seeing it when they could provide input, too. I see it as rude, that someone would take the time to answer the question before publishing it, and then not even publish it.
It is done because while the question is still in the moderation queue, it is seen and responded to only be the OP and by "moderators". In many cases, this allows routine questions (i.e. "Null reference error", "OnCollisionEnter not working", "Expecting semicolon" , yada yada) to be answered by comment without ever needing to be published on the site.
This means the OP gets their problem fixed, and the quality of questions published on the board remains (slightly) higher.
On the $$anonymous$$arma issue you will find most mods who do this have karma to burn.
$$anonymous$$arma naturally accrues to anyone who is active on the site and has half a clue what's going on. While the curve of abilities up to 1k is quite steep, there is not much change after that.
Would have given you more upvotes for that comment @tanoshimi, but it only allows one.
What @tanoshimi said is exactly why I thought other mods did it that way, and why I do (when I do) also. There's no need for this board to have 15,000 topics about the same exact thing like it does and since the send message/comment thing actually works now then we should use it for those types of topics. I guess I could just be an a55h0l3 again and reject everything in the mod-queue that I know for a fact is an uber-basic or multi-duplicate question that someone could find their answer to with a google search or two, if that's what's preferred, but I think a quick comment/message to the OP to help them out without publishing the topic and adding to the clutter in here is better.
So what's it going to take to get a Send $$anonymous$$essage that works!!!???? What's it been since this site has had a reliable method of communicating back: Eighteen months? If the moderation queue is the method by which we want to filter out questions, we need a reliable way of communicating back to the OP the issues with the question. This problem cannot be that hard. Getting this to work is at the top of my list of improvements for this site.
From a previous post, it was implied that the support for this site was handled by a third party. $$anonymous$$aybe Unity needs to take a look at that relationship. Or perhaps that third party needs to have an active presence on this site so that issues get addressed.
The logic behind this is not to publish simple answers that can easily be solved through a quick link to the documentation, or a quick typo fix. The idea when doing this is that the question will not get published at all, the future moderator should reject the question not publish it.
The reason why you don't reject straight away is there is difficulty seeing the comments on a question that has been rejected. If the send message process on the mod queue actually sent an email out or something then the correct way to deal with these posts would be to send message and reject straight away.
I have no particular preference for the practice either way, but it is a good idea for mods to be consistient.
I guess lately I've just been seeing more really long and complex answers, and if it's just a matter of answering a simple question, that would make sense. I've seen the short and stupid ones, those aren't the ones I'm referring to. I understand your point, though.
I've also seen some of these commented-on questions accepted afterwards, maybe we could leave a tag of some sort on our comment to let moderation know that it shouldn't be published?
I started doing this after reading:
[[META] Unity Answers is degrading .... MODERATORS TAKE NOTE](http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/432710/meta-unity-answers-is-degrading-.html)
[[meta] Is Answers doomed?](http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/708982/meta-is-answers-doomed.html)
In terms of moderation, I'm inclined to reject those questions outright. They add nothing to the site in terms of quality content. It does us no good to have thousands of repeat questions, many of which are unanswered or poorly answered. If you've been around for a while, you've no doubt noticed that many of the site's regulars feel that way.
Stack Overflow and Wikipedia have dealt with similar problems: a whole lot of people want to post a whole lot of low-quality content, and unless someone specifically tells them no, the site's usefulness is going to plummet.
So, instead of rejecting a question, I sometimes leave a comment suggesting a solution. Sometimes the person comments back, sometimes they don't. To me, that seems slightly better than just rejecting the question with no explanation. As far as I know, it's worth zero karma.
