One concern with the Craft Stack Exchange site

Question

Proposal: Craft CMS

Stack Exchange is developed around the concept of a "well-formed" question. You will often see new users ask questions which SE administrators don't view as "well-formed". I am admittedly guilty of asking these types of questions on SE sites, hence my familiarity with this topic...

When a user is new to a community, Craft in this case, asks a simple question that may violate the "don't ask" criteria - often these questions will be automatically flagged or removed as "not constructive". I believe this will offer a negative introduction to Craft as users will not view this as a "SE" regulation but the "community" that surrounds Craft.

So the real question is SE the best environment for new users to ask questions that may not be well-formed? I personally don't believe it is for NEW users because of the SE policy, but for experienced users its great. Maintaining a Google+ style Q&A is critical, as well as the Q&A on the Craft website, to ensure that new users have a place to ask those quick and often short thought questions.

Just a thought, I only want to see the community continue to thrive as it has been.

Answer 1

I don't think it is any more of a problem for Craft than it is for any other SE site. Everyone starts somewhere and there's a difference between what might be a 'simple' question and a poorly written one. Stack Exchange is a great environment for simple questions, just not those that are difficult to digest.

Answer 2

Questions that aren't well formed, but are otherwise good questions, that will lead to good content, can be edited to produce a well formed answer.

Questions shouldn't be removed unless they are awful. This gives people a good picture of good vs bad questions.

You shouldn't be too worried about offending people who are new to SE for closing their questions; that's how SE maintains high quality content. Yes, having your question downvoted or closed is hurtful, but so long as people are polite and respectful to new users, that's the best you can do.

Answer 3

I think its actually a good thing to not pass everything. Because I find it harder when you ask a stupid question and as a response you get «Google it you "ç%ç"».

Being informed via the «not constructive» alert is way more relaxing.

Answer 4

Please remember, eventually as we grow, that most new questions will have been asked already. New users will in-turn see questions which are similar in a drop down while they start typing their question's title. This will cut a considerable amount of malformed questions from the start because said questions already have answers to them.

We'll have moderators who will likely moderate with some form of bed side manner, if you will, in cases where questions are so poorly asked that there is no possible way to answer them from the start and therefore up for flagging/moderating etc.

Ultimately G+ MAY go away but, there isn't anyone, at this point anyway, saying it will. If it does it's only due to the fact that no one was using it anymore which as I say may or may not happen.

And there isn't anything stopping P&T from offering a support system of their own should the need arise and or if they see fitting to do so.

Everything will be revealed to us in due time. With that said, currently there is a huge push for Craft Exchange because there is definitely a need for it.

Answer 5

I have to be honest, this is the exact reason I dislike SE. When searching for answers to problems, I'm always finding people asking the exact question I'm struggling to find an answer to, and the questions are almost always closed for various arbitrary reasons.

It's utterly infuriating.

However, at least the searching works well, unlike G+, so it has my backing for now, and we'll see how long it takes for me to get annoyed with it.