Give new users and persistent offenders (who write poorly received posts) a tutorial they must complete before they can post, which highlights good and bad posts, along with reasoning as to why they are judged as they are.

The idea behind it is to educate these users about what the community expects to a degree when it comes to posting. The knock on effect is to hopefully reduce the number of bad posts as well as reduce the amount of time experienced user spend explaining the same things over and over again in comments and via voting.

There are plenty of suggestions about how to educate new users to help improve the quality of posts.

Some of the latest examples:

We already have a tour, MCVE and the help centre in general. All of which contain pages of information that would require a fair amount of time to digest and understand. I for one, found me feet by asking, paying attention to comments and learning from my mistakes and can honestly say that I've rarely read any of those pages in detail.

I'm not sure asking new users to read something in addition to what is already there is going to prevent the type of questions that they will ask. There is the click through mentality where they will see a next/continue button and carry on.

Why not have something interactive, similar to how we have review audits for reviewers, where we are tested and have to make a conscious decision in order to pass the review, at which point we are presented with a "Congratulations" or "Stop... Pay attention".

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Tutorial

The purpose of the tutorial would be to highlight what the community deems to be good and bad when it comes to posting.

This tutorial would make all new users (and possibly persistent offenders) review and judge the quality of some sample posts. They would have achieve a pass threshold (which is open to suggestions) in order to be able to continue. Users could be presented with posts that are good, bad and down right ugly alongside advice that highlights what is expected of questions / answers.

They will be asked to choose:

  • Good: Nothing wrong, question that follows community guidelines
  • Bad: Question doesn't meet the requirements for posting for one or many reasons
  • Ugly: The question has clear formatting issues with code, GRAMMAR & sppleing

Sample question review:

enter image description here

On the right hand side would be links similar to the Asking help content, that could popup a dialog with a few short lines / bullet points that provide information. Or instead of the full list, perhaps just some specific points about the current item that is being reviewed, so if they are unsure of how to vote, there will be relevant options there to highlight what the potential issues with the post are.

Reviews & Feedback

In the tutorial, after each review item has had a decision cast on it, a dialog should appear alongside the question to highlight exactly why it was good, bad or ugly, so the users can see what is expected and hopefully learn from it.

enter image description here

Reviews for questions and answers would test all of the standard items that appear in the review queue.

The voting choices are simple, but they would require some attention to the post that is being reviewed. If the user fails, we don't want to block them, so they should be able to retry immediately to hit the pass threshold. Hopefully they would pay more attention if they fail the first time.

While there could be a click through mentality with this, hopefully with a good choice of posts to review it could be made slightly challenging so that it wouldn't be a simple case of being able to guess at the correct answer by looking at the post.

This proposal is not intended to be complicated and take a long time to complete, it should be quick and simple to step through, as review audits are. A user that is paying attention should be able to go through a few reviews in a few minutes, which in the grand scheme of the amount of time they might spend on the site is a small fraction of time where they might learn something of value.

Compare these few minutes of practical against the amount of time it would take to go through the tour, understand what MCVE is and read the content of the help centre.

How to tailor the posts?

Sample posts should be as generic as possible and not require an in depth knowledge of a specific technology or tags. Most developers should be able to understand a post that has some simple question text with a little bit of code. We don't want the sample posts to prevent people from being able being able to get on with the tutorial.

A few favourite or specialist tags could be selected prior to the sample post selection so we could tailor it, although with the amount of tags in the system it may be hard to produce enough posts that are suitable for the review if more obscure tags are selected.

Users could also have a skip option if they are unsure about the correct choice on a specific post, which wouldn't count against them. In this scenario they would still see the feedback about what the correct choice should be and why.

Thanks for reading, feedback welcomed.

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    I think thats a very good idea. – Angelo Fuchs Jul 22 '14 at 9:39
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    Where will this fit in? Would this be optional or compulsory before asking a first question? Where would the questions come from? How are they determined whether they are good or bad or ugly? – Matt Jul 22 '14 at 9:39
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    I think it should be compulsory. I think having a small hurdle before they can post would benefit the site and reviewers, taking in to account quality over the needs of a single individual who wants and immediate answer. – Tanner Jul 22 '14 at 9:40
  • Do you think the posts to be voted upon should be automatically selected or should be hand-picked? If the latter by the community or the mods? Or gold-badge holders of their tag? – Angelo Fuchs Jul 22 '14 at 9:42
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    I don't know. I'm not completely against your idea. I'd prefer replacing the long, boring wall of text how-to-ask page will a page of similar format to /tour, where the "guide"/ "tutorial" guides you through a good post and highlights what makes it good. Posts can be "bad" or "ugly" for multiple reasons. – Matt Jul 22 '14 at 9:43
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    What about if a new user asks a (few) bad question(s) they then need to complete this exercise before posting again? – SW4 Jul 22 '14 at 9:45
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    @AngeloNeuschitzer That's up for discussion I'd say. I think hand picked by the community or mods would be safer as the advice that follows why it was good, bad or ugly can be tailored per question. – Tanner Jul 22 '14 at 9:45
  • @SW4 yeah, as I mentioned with (and possibly persistent offenders), they could be flagged to re-sit the tutorial/test as we all know there are users with low reps that continue to post low quality and end up being banned for short periods. It would just be another tool to help the fight against this. – Tanner Jul 22 '14 at 9:48
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    Rather than a temporary suspension on failure, simply require X (say 5, for example) correct answers in a row before you are allowed to ask a question. This means if someone feels that they're close, and they made a mistake and they get it now, they can just keep going until they prove it, rather than an arbitrary wait when they feel they get it now. – Servy Jul 22 '14 at 14:10
  • @Servy I agree, I guess the finer details could be ironed out if the SE team decide this is a feature worth implementing. – Tanner Jul 22 '14 at 14:13
  • This does seem like a decent idea. My favorite online game, Kingdom of Loathing, has a similar system: before you can chat, you have to answer a few easy questions that serve to block out anyone incapable of reading a few sentences or hu hz noo idz hw 2 pst prp engis - things like "what color was George Washington's black horse?", and "fill in the blanks: ___ going to drive ___ car. [choices: they're / their]" I wouldn't complain about something like that here, at least. (Including some "is this is a decent question?" questions.) Let them keep trying until they get in. – neminem Jul 22 '14 at 20:19
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    I would say that just as the review queues have a skip, this should too. There may be examples that people feel they cannot decipher and that should not be counted against them. – Jenn Jul 22 '14 at 20:23
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    This question was "a tangent" from meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/266270/…. For my part I see no major problem in alienating users with homework who can't write code or debug it. But it might be nice if we could send them somewhere else that would help. – david.pfx Jul 22 '14 at 23:09
  • I believe it is of the utmost importance that "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" in the body of the post links to this: youtube.com/watch?v=LQGGQ-FCe_w – NobleUplift Jul 23 '14 at 16:29
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    The first question should be granted to a new user with no complications at all, or we will lose the user; to ask the second question they may need to pass the exam. In addition, maybe give reputation points for passing this exam more than once. – Alexander Gelbukh Jul 24 '14 at 1:49

Think of what you are suggesting here. You are testing people who:

  • are often not native English speakers
  • many of whom have communication or social skills worse than their code
  • honestly consider a one sentence question to be a perfectly valid question
  • and they have no experience with the way things are done at Stack Overflow

If we can't teach people how to do good reviews in the time it takes to get 2000 rep, how are we going to teach new users with few skills how to write a good question? Sure we could just stop them from asking, but that then hurts Stack Overflow - new users are already complaining about perceived elitism and bullying.

While your intentions are good, I think this idea will have a big unintended side effect of producing a lot of negative blow-back for Stack Overflow. Those people who can't get in will complain any way they can because they will not consider it to be their fault that they failed. They know they're n00bs, they know they can't ask excellent questions, yet you just pushed their heads back under the water and told them to keep breathing....

In response to some comments....

The current system alienates (or causes angst to) enough new users already, we have to deal with enough complaints on Meta as it is - now we want to alienate even more users by denying them the ability to ask their first question?

We could talk all day about the quality of new users and why they are the way they are, but one thing remains: you can't fight the tide, you must work with it and manage it which we already do. I'm not convinced that putting road blocks in the way of these users - especially when we already have significant automated and manual measures in place for dealing with identified users - is going to be particularly productive.

So let's say we don't prevent the users from asking their first question, but we do make them participate in a mini quality oriented test. If you think this is going to work then you haven't heard of the dancing pigs phenomena - these users are fixated on getting an expert answer to their question right now, and a quality oriented test is going to have a negligible effect on most of them because they cannot be educated to the desired level in such a short space of time.

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    I don't think this is designed to get users to ask excellent questions as there's little that can be done on that front. It's more a case of presenting real examples of what's in the help centre. Each review would have a follow up dialog that highlights why the post is good or bad and the reviews should be simple, not overly simple, but enough to require a bit of thought. I don't think this would be an unachievable barrier to access the ability to post on SO. – Tanner Jul 22 '14 at 10:09
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    I remember well my first posts. They were corrected (through comments and edits) and I felt seriously embarrassed. But in the end, it helped me create better questions. A "tutorial" like this promoted here would have helped me. But I agree, we should be careful not to alienate too many of them. – Angelo Fuchs Jul 22 '14 at 10:11
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    @AngeloNeuschitzer Yeah, I didn't think of it from the angle of alienating users. Perhaps it shouldn't block, and instead work on persistent offenders that currently get temporary suspensions, so they will be asked to do it again. – Tanner Jul 22 '14 at 10:14
  • @Tanner It could possibly be an option for persistent offenders, although those are already well handled by existing mechanisms. – slugster Jul 22 '14 at 11:49
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    Your last two bullet points describe exactly why we would benefit from a feature that forces users to spend some time to find out how we do things around here. If someone "honestly considers a one sentence question to be a perfectly valid question" and "they have no experience with the way things are done at Stack Overflow", then teach them instead of just letting them loose. If the effort required is too much for them, too bad. And that stopping them from asking "hurts StackOverflow" is very debatable; alienating the worst users is certainly bad for ad revenue but not for SOs overall quality. – l4mpi Jul 22 '14 at 13:57
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    You're seriously saying that a feature that would prevent or even just make it harder for the worst question askers out there is a bad thing, and that SO would be better off having these bottom tier questions being posted? Really? It just means more effort needs to be spent closing and deleting the questions. – Servy Jul 22 '14 at 14:08
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    @l4mpi: Is preserving SO as a good site really hurting ad revenue? IMO only in the shortest term, look any longer and it preserves the sites existence. – Deduplicator Jul 22 '14 at 15:20
  • @Deduplicator of course, but I've found that people rarely think about long-term benefits when money is involved. I should have worded that differently, but my point wasn't about ad impressions anyways; it's just the first thing that came to mind which could be harmed by the proposal. Also, it's debatable how much the SO viewer count would suffer if all new questions from now on would be total crap - it's still the best reference we have so we can't just leave and never come back, and a huge percentage of the views come from unregistered users via google anyways. – l4mpi Jul 22 '14 at 16:18
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    I can't imagine this would actually hurt SO: the alternative is that those users do post questions, those questions are (deservedly) heavily downvoted and/or deleted, and the users would then, what? Just slink off embarrassed? Wouldn't any user complaining elsewhere if they couldn't pass some (easy to anyone with brains) test, be doing the same sort of complaining given the current system where they get to post crap which then gets immediately crapcanned? – neminem Jul 22 '14 at 20:16
  • @l4mpi I've extended my answer in response to your comments. I've been part of this site for a long time now and variants of this discussion have been going on that whole time - it's not a new problem, nor is it as simple as it seems. As a mod on a different site I also get to deal with these new users so I'm familiar with what drives them and the systems in place to deal with them. – slugster Jul 22 '14 at 22:04
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    By the way, there's an Area 51 proposal brewing for Stack Overflow Academy. – user456814 Jul 22 '14 at 22:14
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    Some Non English speakers have their own versions of SO – podiluska Jul 23 '14 at 10:18
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    I don't think we will alienate them. I gave a constructive comment on how to improve an answer to a seemingly non-English speaker. He thanked me for letting him know but he still didn't fix his answer. stackoverflow.com/a/24903386/2591612 – Brian Jul 23 '14 at 11:31
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    @tmyklebu they can be, but most of them are not. Think code dump + "why this no work?" (or error dump + "halp I has exception!") - I consider these "one-sentence questions". Actual thoughtful, valid questions that are condensed enough to fit into one sentence are very rare in my experience. – l4mpi Jul 23 '14 at 15:37
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    @l4mpi: That's more than one sentence! :) Often, good questions are one sentence long but embedded in several paragraphs of "yes I did my homework" and "here's why the stupid thing you're about to recommend is stupid" fluff. – tmyklebu Jul 23 '14 at 15:40

So, a user comes to SO looking for help on and is asked what they think of a question... I can see that ending badly. Getting them to indicate the tags they are interested in up front would probably not work well, as the list of tags is huge. It might be better to audit new users after they have made a few posts, so the system can guess the tags they are interested in, and only if they have made posts that are not well recieved.

If the system has enough smarts to broadly identify the kind of problems there are with a new user's posts, it could tailor the review to those problems.

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    Not sure why the code matters. I review things from all sorts of codebases. I am certainly not an expert in them, but you can tell a good question from a bad question. Or a good answer from a bad answer. – Brian Jul 22 '14 at 21:12
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    I don't see why picking a few tags would be an issue if it were to go down that route. Anyone coming to SO will have some specialist/favourite technologies surely. As @staticx mentions, the sample posts should be pretty clear cut and not involve an in depth understanding of a specific technology. The idea is to highlight issues with posts per se and educate users about what makes a good post not teach then how to use Haskell. – Tanner Jul 22 '14 at 22:15
  • +1 for pointing out flaws with the idea. -1 for thinking it's fixable. – Dan is Fiddling by Firelight Jul 23 '14 at 18:25
  • @Brian "Hmm, I see a lot of code here, it's gibberish to me. It's only a dozen lines, but I can't understand what it's doing. The user talks about what they're doing and what's wrong, but I fundamentally don't understand their description or code." Is the question a good question or a bad question? – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 28 '17 at 16:39
  • Depends. If you could probably understand what the problem would be if it was written in your preferred programming language then it is probably a good question, just not one you can answer. And there's nothing wrong with that. – SandPiper Jul 29 '17 at 14:05
  • @Draco18s: I have no idea. It is over 3 years later. Why comment now? – Brian Aug 21 '17 at 19:40
  • @Brian I probably didn't notice the date. – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Aug 21 '17 at 21:33

I think it's too much of a barrier. How do you know you will be giving good examples of questions to rate vs. just confusing people? There isn't unanimous consent all the time as is. And as pointed out by @Raedwald, a critical reading of a question is complicated by the language used.

My pre-flight questions proposal is three checkboxes, shuffled from a known list. If the system knows what check boxes a user ticked, whether they went back and reviewed their question because of it, and what happened to the question after...you get metrics.

The key w/pre-flight is crowdsourcing of friendly tips and see which ones have an impact. Quick, light, fun...from the site that brought you unicoins and winter hats. This proposal sounds like it might just seem even more elitist. Better to keep the focus on a good first experience--that's what gives people an incentive to invest more into learning and improvement.

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    I would go with hand picked, clear cut posts that don't involve having an in depth knowledge of any specific language. It shouldn't be based on complex samples that are too long of complicated to understand. The aim is to compare and judge posts that look good and clear against low quality posts. – Tanner Jul 23 '14 at 15:55
  • @Tanner Why am I reminded of the gig simulator from Tenacious D? :-) Well it raises the question of who'll pick those... hard to drive with votes... and still seems a bit much to be in the way when you don't know if the person will be fine or make a mistake yet. Maybe a tool for helping after repeat issues. – HostileFork says dont trust SE Jul 23 '14 at 16:14

This suggestion suffers from the same problems that the other suggestions suffer from:

  • Adding mandatory hurdles to asking questions is a non-starter. We absolutely do not want to annoy new users. Forcing them to click through some "let's review some questions first" dialogs is going to make most people (including people who would ask good questions) go somewhere else.

  • On the other hand, making it completely optional means that the majority of problematic users aren't going to ever see it. If they don't read the stuff we show them now, they certainly aren't going to jump through any other hoops.

So, we've got a bit of a paradox. We don't want to annoy the good, but the bad and the ugly won't click anywhere other than posting their question as quickly as possible.

Honestly, the existing downvotes and closevotes go pretty far to educating new users. I think we'd have better luck expanding what already works instead of tacking on additional hoops that people have to jump through.

Just thinking out loud, but the piece that seems missing is that after a post has been downvoted and closed, it's not very likely that it will ever be reopened, even if the user improves their question. So there isn't much incentive to improve questions. We need to make this pathway much smoother, to both new users whose questions have been downvoted and closed, and to users who are downvoting and closing questions in the first place.

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    And even if a downvoted and closed question is edited into one of the best questions the site has ever seen, it still has the mark of death on it. How many people will even open a question with -5 score on the fourth page of questions? – SandPiper Jul 29 '17 at 14:08
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    @SandPiper Exactly. That gives users zero incentive to improve their posts. Basically we need to make it more likely that a post is reopened and answered than it is that a new (bad) post is answered. No amount of "education" is going to help if I'm more likely to get help by just posting another crappy question. – Kevin Workman Jul 29 '17 at 16:29
  • I've posted an update on my question in an attempt to add some clarity. – Tanner Jul 31 '17 at 8:17
  • @Tanner I think you're vastly underestimating the inconvenience that your suggestion causes to both good and bad users. You should also consider the inconveneience of "switching contexts" here: I don't have to understand anything specific to Stack Overflow to read a few help articles or the MCVE page. I do have to understand stuff specific to Stack Overflow if I have to step through the review process. This will drive users to other sites, which means the admins will never go for it. – Kevin Workman Jul 31 '17 at 16:27
  • I understand what you're saying & I agree to a degree, but I'm putting question quality at the front of the line here and the needs of users in a hurry to post their first question after that. Users already have to do the tour, would you consider that an inconvenience? I had a look through it the other day, and must admit, I didn't like the UI and layout. It looked more like a designers pet project rather than something new users would gain something from. Users that ask questions are more than likely familiar with the site, they've probably got answers from the site before asking a question. – Tanner Aug 1 '17 at 8:13

Your question is amazingly clear and well documented (and describes well the Wild Wild West situation here at SO :)), however, it just adds an extra barrier for new users.

From memory (sorry, I'm a fuzzy guy, there are probably a lot more) there are already a few checks when posting a question:

  • require at least one tag (more for meta)
  • detects code-only questions
  • not more than 2 URL links for new users

Okay, some users are desperate to see their question asked. So

  • they put 5 popular tags hoping that someone sees their question
  • unindent the code / put blurb as non-code to fool the code threshold
  • truncate the URLs ...

But remember your first post: you probably did an OK job, because you already saw other posts, and you're polite enough to know how to ask (not only on this site, but to your colleagues, to someone you don't know).

Adding an extra "tour" will probably block the ones who don't respect others like you do, but will also block nice, beginner people who sometimes ask okay questions (with some help from the others, editing) and improve with time (like we all did), and sometimes - willingly or not -,raise an important issue. If you visited Experts Exchange once, you'll know what I mean.

If I was being presented with an audit the first time I asked a question here, I probably would have thought "what the hell?" and would have posted my question on a LOL trash forum instead. The only reason you don't hang up when your ISP makes you wait with automated suggestions like "have you tried to turn it on and off again ?" is that your ISP is the only one which can help you with your connection...

When some stupid bozo asks a code-dump question or totally irrelevant rant about why there are several languages, why not keep the best one, ... it gets heavily downvoted by humans and closed in minutes (and some take pleasure in doing so I may add). But in the end only humans are able to detect if the post is on-topic or not. And the moderation privileges policy awarded to standard users allows to eventually delete the offending post, most of the time without the need of moderator intervention. The thing that annoys me is that such questions get upvotes or lame answers (which also get upvotes). In that case, it's difficult to delete them afterwards.

That said, some small improvements could be done, some small ideas to add to the already existing discreet but efficient checks:

  • detecting "URGENT" in the title of the post
  • detecting posts in non-english language
  • forbid pastebin links where the askers dump their code or data, violating the "link as reference only" policy (not to mention some firewalls prevent users from seeing them)
  • forbid imgur links where the askers post a screenshot of their code or IDE (with or without freehand circles)
  • automatic downvoting bad questions (this one is just for laughs, my first meta post which was quite funny and also bad)

SO is hugely popular and popularity has its drawbacks, yes, but in the end we don't want to disturb its subtle balance.

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One thing I think would help for new users, is simply to test if the question text contains a ?, and if not show the user a "You will get the best response, if you ask a direct question" text.

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    Yeah but any programming language that uses the ? operator for something (I have C# in mind because it is the one I know) would break this, wouldn't it? – IEatBagels Aug 7 '14 at 19:16
  • It could exclude question marks in code blocks. – SandPiper Jul 29 '17 at 14:11
  • This does not answer the question if the proposed function is useful, so it seems not to answer the question. – PJTraill Nov 1 '17 at 22:37

Stack Overflow serves (rather well) several distinct communities of users. Among them I'd call your attention to R users. They're the scientists and engineers trying to make sure your cancer treatment won't kill you and that the bridge you drive over to get to the hospital where you receive your cancer treatment won't collapse and kill you.

They largely have no idea about PHP development or jQuery or anything of the sort. They will get this wrong and be driven away from the site when they're trying to ask their very-relevant questions about how to tell whether a treatment or bridge is going to kill you. Please try not to waste too much of their time fighting the deluge of crap questions.

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    As an R user I don't agree with you. – Roland Jul 23 '14 at 15:32
  • Sorry, what's an R user? Is that software of some form? – Tanner Jul 23 '14 at 15:33
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    @Tanner A user of the R language. – Roland Jul 23 '14 at 15:34
  • @Tanner: R is a programming language oriented toward statistics. – tmyklebu Jul 23 '14 at 15:34
  • Yeah thanks, just been scouting through some of @Roland's questions and seen that. – Tanner Jul 23 '14 at 15:35
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    @Roland: You're welcome to elaborate on that. But I don't think welcoming R users with "here's a question about jquery that we consider high-quality" and "oh, and this php question is crap" sends the right message. – tmyklebu Jul 23 '14 at 15:35
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    R is not so different from other languages in that regard. We like questions with a clear problem description and reproducible code that show some effort. The programming language is pretty irrelevant for recognizing question quality. – Roland Jul 23 '14 at 15:38
  • This kind of follows the jist of Raewald's answer meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266450/57475, to which I have commented on. – Tanner Jul 23 '14 at 15:39
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    @Roland: R the language isn't different from C the language, sure. R's userbase is very different from C's userbase, though. Inexpert programmers are not going to be able to differentiate between "here's some obviously broken code and an error message; why does this happen?" and "here's some code that gives a genuinely surprising result; why does this happen?" It's very easy to mistake a poorly-written example of the latter sort for the former, even for a seasoned programmer. – tmyklebu Jul 23 '14 at 15:43
  • @Roland: Additionally, inexperienced programmers are missing a chunk of knowledge that's roughly the same in every language. When faced with a crap question about this stuff, they have no way to tell it apart from a language-specific question or an unexpected, surprising result question. – tmyklebu Jul 23 '14 at 15:47
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    I'm not active at the C tag, but I don't think you have a good understanding of the quality standards we expect and enforce in the R tag. I'm not sure that the fraction of questions from people who really aren't programmers is so different in both tags. However, I never said that I support the proposal. – Roland Jul 23 '14 at 15:50
  • @Roland: You're right; I don't have a good understanding of the R tag's quality standards. The R tag looks very different from the C tag to me, though. I do see a lot of elementary "I'm trying to run <statistical test> on my data frame and something weird happens" questions, but they're typically well-written, narrow, and detailed enough. My point is that such R users seem to be worth keeping around while their analogues for most other languages are definitely not. – tmyklebu Jul 23 '14 at 16:33
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    This reads like a 'R users are superior and therefore not subject to the rules of this site' rant to me – sevenseacat Jul 24 '14 at 1:49
  • @sevenseacat: You can read it like that, sure. You could also read it as "let's try not to alienate a significant fraction of our userbase on this half-baked crusade," which is how I meant it. – tmyklebu Jul 24 '14 at 2:09
  • if the question is good enough, it doesn't disclose the context. So maybe you already answered a good question and the OP used that to create a ransomware... I don't see why R users couldn't do the same. And which language the bad guys would be using ? c, perl? note that I sometimes have sympathy for questions when data clearly mentions illnesses/medecine, but that doesn't make them good questions. – Jean-François Fabre Jul 29 '17 at 7:30

I do not believe the actual level of elitism shown by this discussion topic! I have seen more than one question severly downvoted or placed on hold simply because some of the large rep number people didn't get it, not because the question was actually bad.

I think that in general a question being asked deserves a least a bit of consideration, chances are the person asking has a real problem, so instead of just moving on why not try to see their point and help them. Suggest ways to make the question better in a positive way - that seems to not happen very often, rather some flip comment or down vote.

If the question truly is duplicate putting a reference to the original is fine but simply closing it seems mean spirited, let people answer it anyway who is hurt and maybe some of the newer people can get a chance to help someone else.

Overall I guess what I am trying to say is that no question is bad or stupid if the asker is really stumped - remember you were a beginner once, give people a break.

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    Firstly, everyone is entitled to an opinion, that's what Meta is here for. Using SO is a journey, with tough lessons at times, I know from experience. It's how I learnt what is expected from the community. My suggestion is aimed at helping users to find their feet with a useful tutorial as opposed to dozens of help pages. I feel it'd be better if a tutorial, controlled by SO, gives guidance in a consistent manner as opposed to numerous users down voting, closing and potentially offending users with comments. Up front advice that is mandatory is surely better than finding out the hard way? – Tanner Jul 23 '14 at 21:57
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    @Tanner - maybe the ease of posing a question on SO is why SO is dominant in this area at this point in time? Prior to SO there were definitely sites and newsgroups for discussion of topics relating to computing and programming. For the sake of reducing moderation load you could end up completely diverting the site's traffic. Honestly I don't think new users mind poorly formatted questions etc because its a chance for them to edit/flag for rep. Its the ones who already have rep that see the task as a massive grind and nuisance. – BSAFH Jul 23 '14 at 23:10
  • @BSAFH I don't think SO has to worry about traffic being diverted: highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/…. New users may not mind poorly formatted questions, but users that post them are actively going against the sites posting guidelines: stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask. – Tanner Jul 24 '14 at 9:16
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    @Tanner MySpace drew 42 million unique visitors in May `06. I don't know what that would mean in page views, but I hope you get my point that no website should take its traffic for granted. AOL and Yahoo are also good examples. Why did Facebook achieve its current status when Myspace, Livejournal and similar sites already existed? Attitude towards content will certainly be a factor. Can you imagine if Facebook stopped people from stalking? That might be like SO stopping newbs from n00bing. might. I don't know for sure, just saying we should be wary. – BSAFH Jul 24 '14 at 23:12
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    @BSAFH I hear what you're saying, but SO != MySpace – Tanner Jul 25 '14 at 8:24
  • @BSAFH Ease of asking a question is certainly one factor, but why would you ask it on SO and not somewhere else? Because SO has a reputation of being able to give answers of high technical quality. Unlike pretty much every other site out there. If it was just an elitist, arrogant site with low quality of content, it would be dead. No matter if you get millions upon millions of newbs floating about, teaching each other how to not do programming. The site would get a bad reputation and die, no matter how friendly it is. – Lundin Nov 27 '18 at 12:10
  • @Lundin Look at this: stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=votes The majority of top voted questions aren't for "super complex" things. They're for basic bread and butter "how do I do my job" or "How do I do my assignment?". They may contain some high value technical discussion, but it isn't what they were asked for. SO isn't some nirvana of knowledge (that would be Urban Dictionary), its wikipedia for devs except with the downside that if you want to actually ask a question, you gotta deal with the politics. SO could easily survive on helloworld and "how do I workflow?". – BSAFH Nov 29 '18 at 7:32
  • @Lundin Cont'd. Anecdotally, I've been using SO less and less. Social technet and others often have better google results (partly because SO has too many possible pathways for simpler queries) and have been employing similar concepts around votes, marked answers etc. SO has probably seen a growth in visitors but you may also find a growth in devs who dont really know what theyre doing (myself included). This latest drama with npm and event-stream may bring about a golden age of self-rolled solutions. Or at least kill some of these idiotic answers that just suggest a random net library. – BSAFH Nov 29 '18 at 7:36
  • @BSAFH Popular topics, like version control, get the most votes of course. That doesn't really prove anything. The strength of SO as I see it, is the domain experts available. You don't get away with teaching incorrect facts or bad practices, like countless internet tutorials and even some books do. No matter your level of knowledge, there's always bigger fish lurking around, prepared to snap at you. And so even those who mostly answer questions learn lots. My own Q/A ratio is something like 1/100 yet I learn things here and there from SO, all the time, even as a seasoned dev. – Lundin Nov 29 '18 at 7:58
  • @Lundin It is difficult for me to make a case given the character limits, but others have identified a number of SO weaknesses. Including that CI/CD's spread means that minor variations of issues are constantly coming out, but good luck getting past 'dupe question' stuff. There is indeed bad advice on SO, I come across it a lot during my googles. Please note: I basically stopped using this site years ago. The 'me' you're arguing with was promoting the community allowing participation from less-well-formatted people. I left. You get it? I'm one of the ones driven away by suffocating governance – BSAFH Nov 29 '18 at 8:24
  • @BSAFH And yet, here you are. Participating on meta nonetheless. So there must be something here that you need, otherwise why would you care? In the end, people will always go to where the (correct) knowledge can be found, no matter their level of expertise. – Lundin Nov 29 '18 at 8:57
  • @Lundin You resurrected a 4 year old conversation thread, and I felt like responding. I only knew you'd done it because I got an email. If I use SO, its from work, where I don't log in. – BSAFH Nov 30 '18 at 5:26
  • @BSAFH Oh wow, I didn't even look at the date. Somehow this got bumped as a "hot" or "featured" thread and that's how I ended up here. – Lundin Nov 30 '18 at 7:36

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