Proposed New rules regarding new users?

Question

I have been observing this for 3 days now. You will find tons of new members who ask silly, already answered, homework kinds of question. They either do not take the pain of going through the FAQ or simply choose to ignore it. Now we have preventive measures implemented in the site such as closing of questions or putting them on hold. But, this also fills the question tab with low-quality questions. Sometimes the experienced community members answer such questions, giving some freedom, but I think this issue has been aggravated in the recent week.

I think some new and more robust measures should be taken against this problem.

Answer 1

Yet another review queue isn't the answer. There are already so many to ignore as it is.

people don't follow the rules because:

1. They don't know there are specific rules. They are used to "forum" sites, so just barge in here and blurt out whatever is on their mind.

   I don't care about the dweebs here. It's their job to answer my question.

2. They know there are specific rules here, but don't bother reading them.

   I need help now. I don't have time to read the rules.

3. They did read the rules, but just don't care.

   It's worth a try. The worst they can do is not answer my question, and maybe throw me out. Someone may answer anyway before that happens. I don't plan to be back here, but if I do I can always come back as a different user. I've got nothing to loose.

I think most fall into #1 and #2. A solution for those is to force new users to read the rules. This should be a page that comes up as part of the registration procedure. You have to click "yes I've read the rules and will follow them" to proceed. After that you get a quiz on the rules. You have to pass to continue, else you get dumped back to the rules page.

The deliberately evil #3 types will always be with us, but I think they are the minority. Those will eventually be dealt with by closing, and banning the user after enough bad questions.

Ultimately, the only way to deal with the #3 types is to make sure they don't get what they came here for, which is answers to their questions. The bigger problem is the behavior of other users. Unfortunately, there will always be some wannabe that can't resist looking smart and tries to answer a bad question. We need to make this more difficult and costly. Here are some suggestions:

1. Prevent answers on questions with negative score.

2. Hide existing answers to questions with negative score.

3. When a question is closed for other than being a duplicate, the net rep for each answer is -5 regardless of whatever votes it had.

Added

Here is a great example of what I am talking about. The original question was crap, and was being handled accordingly. Then some misguided do-gooder answered. Even worse, another misguided do-gooder then grossly edited the question. The net result is that the OP dumped crap on us, and with no additional effort of his own, got the desired result.

We need to make this unpleasant and costly for the do-gooders. I did downvote the answer, but that got swamped. Unfortunately there is no recourse against the user that grossly edited the question. It seems solutions #1 and #2 above would have dealt with the issue well enough, and solution #3 would have made the first do-gooder stop and think before answering a clearly bad question.

Answer 2

In my opinion, the solution isn't more review queues, the solution is to stop the crap from entering the site in the first place.

These problems also exist on SO and have been debated endlessly there. You always end up with different camps:

• The "elitists" (among which I apparently belong) who wants to restrict new people's site access and do things like mandatory review before a new user's question is even allowed to enter the site. Or at the very least implement quick ways to easily remove the crap.

• The "meta-task huggers" who think that it is a human right to spew any kind of crap onto the site, and that the problem isn't the new users, but the lack of 42 different review queues through which the crap should be refined by hundreds of high-rep users.

Then there is the site owners who think more crap -> more traffic -> more cash. The site owners control the developers and therefore the developers appear to have their hands tied. So they either remain silent or side with the meta-task huggers, implementing all manner of strange review queues.

SO therefore has no less than 8 different review queues, with different degrees of ineffectiveness.

For the specific case of new users posting crap, you have the "first post" review, which doesn't do a thing, and the "triage" review, which gives a collection of completely random posts that are spat out by a very confused computer algorithm. None of these block crap, all they do is to keep various meta-task huggers busy.

There have been discussions on SO if "gold tag" users should be allowed to instantly close questions. They can currently do so, but only to duplicate questions. But I think this system of "gold tag" moderators might be less applicable to EE, since the tags tend to have much broader scope here.

So please don't look at SO for solutions, it suffers far worse from crap than EE does, and there exists no viable solutions to the problem there.

It is obvious to me that the only viable, long-term solution is to block the crap before it enters the site. Smarter algorithms that go through the post before it can be posted is one option. Review by humans before new posts are allowed on the site is another.

One concrete work-around solution is to give out more moderation rights based on overall rep, to "trusted users" (20k rep). For example, allow them to instantly close/delete any question.

Overall, I think the SE model for moderation of new user posts needs improvement and a much stronger quality focus, so debates like this should probably rather be brought up to meta.stackexchange.com.

Answer 3

It's exam season on the Northern hemisphere. I suspect that's part of the reason for the tide of poor questions in the past week.

StackOverflow has mechanism called Triage. Last time I checked (in Feb this year), Triage existed only on StackOverflow, and unavailable on other stacks. I wish it were available to us too.

Prior art:
discussion about a proposed "quarantine"
lamentation on the lack of friction for new users

Answer 4

This problem has been discussed on SO for as long as I can remember. There are reasonable suggestions, many of which, sadly, were never implemented site-wide:

• removing rep from answers to duplicate questions
• close-vote questions with no attempt at solution
• put a strict cap on questions for help vampires
• prevent low-quality questions from being submitted

So the ideas are already there, it's up to the mods to put these into practice.

Actively punishing users who answer bad questions is a more delicate topic. I'd say, let's strip rep gains from dupe answers first, and see the dynamics.

Answer 5

One solution to eliminate low-quality questions may be an additional reason for closing: excessively simple questions. English SE has this. One such question is Difference in usage between “ostensive” and “ostensible” [closed].

The reason for closing is 'general reference' with the following text:

This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.

This still requires moderation effort and allows the low-quality questions to hit the site, unfortunately.

[Further update]

Looking at Physics SE, there is an explicit call-out for homework problems in the FAQ on Asking. In particular, the first 'forbidden' topic on the list is:

"Do my homework"-type physics questions

Would it be useful to update the EE SE FAQ on Asking in response to the content needs, particularly with respect to assignment-orient problems?

Answer 6

A simple solution is to have some sort of nominal "cooling off" period (say, 72 hours) from joining to being able to ask a question. Perhaps with a way to waive this if you have sufficient rep in another SE area. If someone is just trying to "hit and run" for, say, an exam question they'll likely have to get their question answered some other way since they're probably under a deadline. No additional work for any existing members.