A problem for me is that I don’t often use the evergreen questions (like this one)
I’ve written feature suggestions elsewhere, but I sense people don’t find them compelling, so I thought I’d just flag the problem as I see it: - new answers get added to the bottom and are hard to find - the question itself will never be seen for the first time again and receive the flood of interest it first did - old questions are sometimes poorly phrased or framed
Do you think this is a problem, if so, how should we solve it?
I try to link to the evergreen questions in places people might find them (principally the “Useful Links” post, though I’ll often send the links to people directly if they have a relevant idea).
There are only so many places to put something on the Forum that people are likely to actually find. Some options for upgrading e.g. the “what should someone write?” post:
Turn it into a tag, so that anyone can apply that tag to a request/question and “turn it into a writing idea”
Repost it to the front page every so often, with comments sorted by new or magic
These both use existing mechanisms of the Forum that don’t require new programming, adding a new component to a crowded frontpage, or making people radically change their behavior. Of course, (1) and (2) can be combined — reposting the original posts could help people remember to use the tags for other posts as needed.
These are my proposed solutions from what I guess is least objectionable to most - mark certain questions as “evergreen” that resurface once per year.They are sorted by newness and score rather than just score - Edit the titles of these questions for maximum clarity each time - Perhaps this is true for all posts which are in the top 3% of posts - Evergreen questions start with effectively 0 karma and rise as normal. Likewise their comments reset in karma. After a month, their karma recofigures (voting on a comment in both its original and reset form only awards the user karma once) - High karma users can edit the titles and grammar of evergreen questions of users with lower karma. I know you all hate this, but stack overflow does it and it’s fine
(Late-night quick reaction, tried not to spend much time on it)
This sounds like quite a bit of new code for relatively little benefit, compared to just having a “Frequently Asked Questions” post with links to various question threads. Those links can have nice clean titles that don’t match the original post titles, and subheadings should make the post fairly navigable. The post can then be recommended to new users (or more experienced users, in the sense of “do a good deed by seeing if you have something to add to one of these questions”).
If your goal is to solicit new answers for certain questions every so often, you can always ask a mod to do this (we’ll discuss it) or post the questions yourself, referring back to old threads so people can see past answers and a chain of continuity is created.
I don’t disagree. However I think nothing compares to the initial flood of comments a post gets. I reckon for dinner it could be worth a lot to have a way of putting an idea at the forefront of people’s minds regularly.
A problem for me is that I don’t often use the evergreen questions (like this one)
I’ve written feature suggestions elsewhere, but I sense people don’t find them compelling, so I thought I’d just flag the problem as I see it:
- new answers get added to the bottom and are hard to find
- the question itself will never be seen for the first time again and receive the flood of interest it first did
- old questions are sometimes poorly phrased or framed
Do you think this is a problem, if so, how should we solve it?
I try to link to the evergreen questions in places people might find them (principally the “Useful Links” post, though I’ll often send the links to people directly if they have a relevant idea).
There are only so many places to put something on the Forum that people are likely to actually find. Some options for upgrading e.g. the “what should someone write?” post:
Turn it into a tag, so that anyone can apply that tag to a request/question and “turn it into a writing idea”
Repost it to the front page every so often, with comments sorted by new or magic
These both use existing mechanisms of the Forum that don’t require new programming, adding a new component to a crowded frontpage, or making people radically change their behavior. Of course, (1) and (2) can be combined — reposting the original posts could help people remember to use the tags for other posts as needed.
These are my proposed solutions from what I guess is least objectionable to most
- mark certain questions as “evergreen” that resurface once per year.They are sorted by newness and score rather than just score
- Edit the titles of these questions for maximum clarity each time
- Perhaps this is true for all posts which are in the top 3% of posts
- Evergreen questions start with effectively 0 karma and rise as normal. Likewise their comments reset in karma. After a month, their karma recofigures (voting on a comment in both its original and reset form only awards the user karma once)
- High karma users can edit the titles and grammar of evergreen questions of users with lower karma. I know you all hate this, but stack overflow does it and it’s fine
(Late-night quick reaction, tried not to spend much time on it)
This sounds like quite a bit of new code for relatively little benefit, compared to just having a “Frequently Asked Questions” post with links to various question threads. Those links can have nice clean titles that don’t match the original post titles, and subheadings should make the post fairly navigable. The post can then be recommended to new users (or more experienced users, in the sense of “do a good deed by seeing if you have something to add to one of these questions”).
If your goal is to solicit new answers for certain questions every so often, you can always ask a mod to do this (we’ll discuss it) or post the questions yourself, referring back to old threads so people can see past answers and a chain of continuity is created.
I don’t disagree. However I think nothing compares to the initial flood of comments a post gets. I reckon for dinner it could be worth a lot to have a way of putting an idea at the forefront of people’s minds regularly.
I guess the question is if it’s worth enough.
What you suggest is worth doing too.