I see many questions asked on Stack Overflow which have received one one or more answers but the OP has not added any further feedback on them at all. No comments, no votes, no accepted answer, no more information, and so on.

Since the people who have answered have used their time and attention to answer a question, the OP should not be careless. I think there should be a negative point for such users who leave orphaned questions out there on the network.

What do you think?

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    Questions are not just there for the OP. There is a second, much larger audience: people with the same issue. The OP did those a favour by asking the question. – Martijn Pieters Sep 9 '14 at 13:12
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    If the question lacks information it can be closed as "Unclear what you are asking". People are also free to downvote it. Adding another, automatic, downvote is really not needed. – ShaWiz Sep 9 '14 at 13:44
  • Could you please help me to understand why I am getting negative votes for my question? Isn't my question a favor as well? Or simply I receive negative votes because people disagree with my point of view? – Mehdi Sadeghi Sep 9 '14 at 14:57
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The whole design of the site is that the question author doesn't need to provide feedback at all, so long as the question itself is clear. We have the entire community to provide feedback on the quality of the answers.

If a question is not answerable due to a lack of information from the question author then that will merit close votes and down votes from the community.

If you can come up with some way of automatically figuring out which questions aren't answerable without more info from the question author without requiring people to spend effort evaluating the post and voting to close, then by all means, share it. I don't expect that to be possible though.

  • "The whole design of the site is that the question author doesn't need to provide feedback at all", this answered my question. But as I asked in my comment above I want to understand why people give negative vote to my question? A question should be either "not useful, unclear or without research effort" to get a negative point, I am confused. – Mehdi Sadeghi Sep 9 '14 at 15:05

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