I promise I'm not trying to whine here - I'm asking for genuine feedback to improve.

I posted this question yesterday. It so happens I found the answer on my own soon after - I find it's not uncommon to find your own answer when you make every effort to frame the question - so I posted that as well. I was pleased with both posts since I was unable to find anything helpful by searching DuckDuckGo, Google and SO before posting.

Now both the question and answer have received multiple down votes as well as a vote to close. I understand we're on the internet and I'm not as thin skinned as all that. However, no feedback has been left and I'm all about self-improvement. If it's just trolling (possible since both the question and answer were down voted) I can move on. However, if I've done something that adds to the pile of cruft that gets submitted I'd like to fix it this time so it can help someone else and I'd like to avoid whatever I've done in the future.

The down vote criteria mention:

  1. Does not show any research effort: I linked to documentation sample that I was trying to use to check my work. Not to mention it shows that I didn't just post the question as soon as I saw the answer - I explained what I'd already tried so I didn't waste anyone's effort looking at the right thing. I wanted someone to be able to duplicate the issue if they wanted to try.

  2. Unclear: I seemed pretty clear what I was asking: "What's this error". Also I provided lots of detail since the error message provided no context whatsoever.

  3. Unhelpful: given all the information in the question it's practically a howto on figuring out the problem in the future.

So I'd love any feedback that could improve the question.

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    Possibly some helpful background for you at What's wrong with my self answered question? Some people do seem to think that self-answered questions are improper for some reason. – jscs Jun 6 '15 at 19:16
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    @JoshCaswell "Some people do seem to think that self-answered questions are improper for some reason" Depends. If the question and answer are a good provision for a non existing canonical, these would probably achieved very well. This question doesn't fall into this category. – πάντα ῥεῖ Jun 6 '15 at 19:27
  • I make no judgement on this specific question, @panta; just linking up related discussions. – jscs Jun 6 '15 at 19:35
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    @JoshCaswell thanks for the link it's a good discussion. I'm not one to post a question I already know the answer to. It just happens that I finally came to the answer once I had already hit post on the question. But it does appear there are those opposed to it even if it is discouraged. Personally, I would have written a blog post instead of using SO if that were the situation. – Mark J Miller Jun 6 '15 at 20:36
  • @JoshCaswell I meant "encouraged" not discouraged. – Mark J Miller Jun 6 '15 at 21:03
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    @πάνταῥεῖ I would agree that as long as guidelines are followed self-answering should be encouraged. Although at this point it's speculation for me to assume that has played a role since no one who has down voted has left any feedback. – Mark J Miller Jun 6 '15 at 21:03
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    @MarkJMiller "since no one who has down voted has left any feedback. " They don't need to, read the tooltip of the downvote button. That's informational enough. Anything else would be considered as noise, unless for special cases. Your's isn't one in this regard. – πάντα ῥεῖ Jun 6 '15 at 21:12
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    @πάνταῥεῖ I read meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/285081/… and I see your point. The meta discussion on SO is counter-productive. I don't really care about my reputation points that much so I can just accept the down votes and move on with my life. But that makes me wonder about voting to close a question. When I come across closed questions there's usually a reason given. I understand the need for a vote to remain anonymous but isn't a reason required on a close vote? Couldn't the selected reason be visable to the OP? – Mark J Miller Jun 6 '15 at 21:39
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    My first impression is that this is a wall of text (which makes it really hard to read, and super niche) My recommendation would be to post less, spend some time trying to reduce the question to a more minimal example. There's a lot of code in there, most of which isn't really relevant – Not loved Jun 8 '15 at 1:32
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    My 2p is that your answer continues the question by providing further investigation. It does not say definitively, straight away: here's the answer. The first 2/3rds of the answer could(should?) have been added as an edit to the question, leaving the answer to include just the answer. When adding an answer, do so as if you're someone else answering it - they don't have access to all your investigation, only that baseUrl should be base\www. I didn't downvote, just a possibility of why someone might. – freedomn-m Jun 8 '15 at 10:04
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    I may have downvoted that (altho did not), as to me it is confusing to read, and just looks like a big wall of text. Which makes it hard to read, and unless this is the only post in the google on this topic, I would consider such a wall as "not useful". – Richard Le Mesurier Jun 8 '15 at 14:04
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    Just thought I'd note that your question has 3 close votes for "Off topic because... " -> "This question was caused by a problem that can no longer be reproduced or a simple typographical error. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was resolved in a manner unlikely to help future readers. This can often be avoided by identifying and closely inspecting the shortest program necessary to reproduce the problem before posting." Not sure if I agree with that or not, but there's some feedback for you. – Fred Larson Jun 8 '15 at 14:24
  • I think i've found a way to seriously increase the amount of upvotes on a question... post it to MSO... – GPPK Jun 9 '15 at 14:26
  • @GPPK - yep, post here and you'll get all sorts of activity on your question/answer. I'm not sure this particular question ( on SO ) will be of use to many people, certainly not double digit votes – Display Name is missing Jun 9 '15 at 14:40

The downvote criterion number 3 is not Unhelpful but Not Useful. In any case you should see this as not useful (or helpful) to the person voting. And there is little arguing with that. It is not useful to me, but I have never used Cordova nor karma-runner, so I wouldn't vote, but some others having experience with that or not obviously might.

You start your question with "I can't seem to find an existing answer to why this isn't working." If I were to read the question because the subject interests me, that is irrelevant to whatever you are going to ask. IMO you should leave it out and not have people read it into posterity (and it has already been proven to be untrue within a day anyway).

You start the answer with "Okay so I figured it out", no really I would never have guessed without that information, it is not as if you answered your own post.

If these posts would have come up for review in any of the queues I lurk on, I would have gotten that non relevant stuff out.

The other thing that escapes me is why you use an easily confused string like 'angualr' and function name angular, that doesn't make the answer more easy to understand, even if I would know about the details what you are doing.

From my perspective, but again I never used this stuff, this looks a very specific problem that is not going to help many people. Maybe someone more familiar with the subject matter felt the same, and was motivated to downvote based on that.

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    ... and Executed 0 of 0 Error is not a great title either... – rene Jun 6 '15 at 15:56
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    @rene what once more proves that I tend to skip reading the titles of posts. – Anthon Jun 6 '15 at 16:02
  • Good feedback, thank you. Not sure how the 'angualr' typo happened since I just checked and it's not in my code. As for the non-relevant stuff I can see your point. I tend to be a little conversational when I write so it just comes out that way. As for specificity I would argue that SO is a Q&A site not an FAQ. – Mark J Miller Jun 6 '15 at 20:55
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    @MarkJMiller One other thing: never ask in a comment under your post in general about "why downvotes". I read at least twice on the SE sites that someone would out of principle put another downvote down. If you strongly suspect an existing commentor downvoted, you can of course ask directoy. – Anthon Jun 6 '15 at 21:45
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    @MarkJMiller: SO is a Q&A site for questions that will be of general use to future readers, which rules out questions that are specifically about my particular problem whether it will be useful to others later or not. Specificity is typically not appropriate here. – Ken White Jun 6 '15 at 22:03
  • @Anthon thanks, after reading some other meta discussions I realized that and when back to my original question and deleted my "why the down votes" comments. Plus they sound whiny :) – Mark J Miller Jun 6 '15 at 22:03
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    @KenWhite specificity has to be a difficult call to make. Domain knowledge of course would contribute. I might agree a question about an error that results in "you have a typo" or your path is misconfigured is too specific in most cases. However, often when you're in the n00b situation like I currently am a question like that can be helpful when the error message it ambiguous. – Mark J Miller Jun 6 '15 at 22:22
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    For me personally, this (rather, that) is one of those posts that I start reading but get about a quarter of the way through and think "this is just too much hard work" and give up. Perhaps people downvote for the same reason: it's really not clear without studying it and, even then, it's hard to see how it's a useful entry in this Q&A repository. – Lightness Races in Orbit Jun 8 '15 at 9:48
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    @Anthon I think "why downvotes" has a place in the comments as some people might see an error in the post, downvote but not comment on their reasons. It might help to improve the post by getting clarification on some needed edits. – runDOSrun Jun 8 '15 at 14:13
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    @runDOSrun that might be, but it assumes that the downvoter comes back and reads the post. One would have to weight that against other downvoting because the comment is there. IMO the latter is a more likely and I think what the OP did, come to meta (of course not for every downvoted question) helps more. – Anthon Jun 8 '15 at 14:27
  • @Anthon Such a comment does not justify a downvote by the criteria. It might bring more attention and thus cause more downvotes but then again, I'd argue that a) the a negative vote score is far more attracting to further downvotes than a comment and b) a comment asking for clarification is a chance to improve/delete the post to solve the issue. There is simply no other way other than going to meta if there are no comments left. And a comment asking for clarification (which can be deleted afterwards) is better than dumping it to meta instantly. Someone else might answer there just like here. – runDOSrun Jun 8 '15 at 15:30
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    @runDOSrun I agree that such a downvote is not justified, but that doesn't mean it is not happening, nor that some have commented (elsewhere) that this is the reason. I just recommended that the OP keep that in mind when being confronted by unexplained downvotes. IMO asking why the downvotes is a communication primarily to the downvoter (who might never see it), not to other readers but that is arguable and I see your point. – Anthon Jun 8 '15 at 17:48
  • I had a similar experience yesterday. I posted this question: stackoverflow.com/questions/30717551/how-to-make-svg-responsive/… and it was immediately downvoted. I was so angry that I typed an angry comment telling people to back off if they don't want to answer, but don't downvote to discourage people (i spent all day searching and trying different solutions on the web to no avail and had someone downvoted within minutes -- not to mention i spent a long time typing that question!). The post generated great discussions and helpful answers in the end, so i'm happy. – CleverNode Jun 9 '15 at 13:54

I read it now and (despite all the sympathy upvotes) the answer reads as very "autobiographical". If I had a similar problem and needed help, I wouldn't want to read about the thought process you went through as you felt your way to the solution. I'd want to read (a) what was wrong, (b) how to fix it, (c) where to look for more information if my problem is not exactly the same as yours.

Also the question contains way too much code; I can understand putting it there when you didn't know what the matter was and you were just dumping everything in the question, but now that you have an understanding of the problem you should clean up your question-answer pair so that both parts show only what's relevant. (I wouldn't be able to do that for you, but you can because you now understand the problem; that's the point.)

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    I came to say exactly this. This is written like a long-form blog post, not a concise question and answer. Trim the verbosity, trim the unimportant code, then you'll have a good question and answer. – Sam Hanley Jun 8 '15 at 15:30
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    I'm not trying to defend the question, but SO punishes people who don't show what they have already tried. I know that has caused me to add useless "autobiographical" fluff in the past. – Suragch Jun 9 '15 at 2:04
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    True, I've been there myself. But that certainly doesn't explain the autobiographical answer :-) – alexis Jun 9 '15 at 9:24
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    @Suragch In question, okay, but some autobiographical things like "that got rid of the error details, but didn't fix anything" in the answer are absolutely superfluous. – Blackhole Jun 9 '15 at 13:53

One thing that @Anthon didn't mention that jumped out to me after reading the Q&A is the fact that the answer actually seems to show more research than the question. That to me is a red flag that the question was not as fleshed out and detailed as it probably needed to be. Specifically, I don't know that anyone could have answered your question without the additional error message information that you put into your answer. So that at least could be a reason to downvote the question but not the answer.


Question and answer show a good research effort. This question/answer also help answer potential error messages for people with same error message. However there is lots of unnecessary code and the answer is very specific. Positives outweigh the negatives though, since this may solve a problem for somebody in the future. Maybe the answer is too specific but it could still be of some help by some chance so I wouldn't downvote.

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