I have seen many questions in Stack Overflow which are unanswered or answers that do not provide solutions. When I need a solution for something, I have been stuck because there's no solution there. Even when the answerer got many upvotes, and I decided to try the solution, they have mostly not worked.   What exactly should the community do to unanswered or unsolved questions? Is there a specific community legally authorized by this site to review and answer such questions for others to get valid references?
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I asked a question almost as soon as I got my account. I got a few decent answers, but none of them helped solve my problem. The question has long since become buried by newer questions, and there's still no accepted answer. Unfortunately, because there are quite a few answers with votes, to a casual observer it probably looks like the question was answered and I just neglected to mark an answer as accepted, and the system does not consider it "unanswered".  Or, I asked a question that was a bit more difficult to answer. After waiting for some time, I received no answers, little or no comments, and only a few views. The question does show up in the "unanswered" list, but no one has answered my question.  In either case, what's the protocol for me to try to get this question answered?  I see several options:   Post the question a second time, possibly linking to the original, to get attention for the original question. This is encouraged on sites like Reddit.  However, it's probably not appropriate here, since we're encouraged to check for duplicates and not submit a question that's already been asked by someone else, so this probably falls under that heading. Wait for some kind of wiki-like talk page to be implemented, then post a plea on the talk page for input and hope that activity on the talk page bumps up the question. Edit the question, but do nothing further on the Stack Exchange site. If I edit my post to say that I haven't accepted any of the current answers but am looking for more, then the question might get answered eventually by people browsing through old questions to find something they can answer. Post the question on other sites, but link to my original question on Stack Exchange. People will either answer here, or they'll answer on the other site and I can post the accepted answer here myself.  This might be considered spamming, so it might be better to do this without the link.      For more information, see the "" page in the .
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I have answered . My answer had links to valuable information in context of the problem, but the conclusion was useless (striked through in my answer). Another user gave correct solution to the problem in question, in the comment to the answer.  I decided to quote his comment, so my answer would be more likely upvoted. (I could say also: to make my answer complete and more informational; but to be honest, in the end it is because of the reputation :) )  Although I quoted it, because of the reputation issue, I'm not sure how ethical it is. On the other hand, reputation is just a mechanism for getting quality answers to clearly stated practical questions, in short for the site to have the qualitiy and valuable practical information.   So, my questions are:   is this action ethical? is this action acceptable? does this action indeed add to the quality of solution of the problem in question (e.g for some unknown (probably, but not neccessary, non SO user) surfer who stumbles upon it searching for the solution)?
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I believe most people . Surely some use the "" link above, or the others filtering options. Others just attack them randomly when they're feeling a thrust of need to answer questions. And there are the foreigns who come across questions for whatever reason (such as google) to eventually give an answer.  I don't have a method, but I see there are way too many unanswered questions (right now,  and ). There's probably at least one question there that I could answer, but I'm finding it quite too hard to find the ones that are "right for me".  So, how do you do to find your answerable questions?  I couldn't even find a duplicate to this, as I figure there must be one.
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Is there a Stack Exchange site where users post their questions not to get answers or to get up voted or down voted for quality, but to decide on which site to post their questions? If not, does anybody else think that a site like this should be created? Up votes and down votes could be allotted for how obvious the correct site to post to is. For example, a question that obviously asks about why their code is broken would be sent to SO possibly with down votes. However, a question that spans both programming and academia where it is unclear which subject is dominant, could get up votes for its complexity and deserving to be asked.   Is helping to decide where questions go a function of Meta Stack Exchange or should another site be created?  Are there any negatives to creating a site like this?
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I was reading  last night. When I got to the bottom, where the answer button usually is, I saw the following message in its place:     protected by Won't Jun 13 '11 at 16:28      Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted   low-quality answers, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on   this site.      Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?   I wasn't planning on answering it, but it did make me curious as I have 101 rep on the site. Is this a bug, or is there something I am missing?
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This is that type of question, but it's fundamental.  Information on Meta Stack Exchange states I can ask anything related to the Stack Exchange websites, its communities and some other stuff, but I have questions such as this about just asking questions which is not directly connected to Stack Exchange.  The FAQ doesn't satisfy me completely. Where were the FAQ asked? Was it here?  If this question is legitimate (Not the greatest questions you've seen... I know) in the Meta Stack Exchange community then I can be more specific. I'm new to this and just trying to get to know how and what I ask in here.
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Problem People post a bad question, for any of the following reasons:  Not researched Off topic Poorly written/formatted No sign of any attempt to solve problem Classic help vampire question etc  This gets downvoted and often without comments. It's exhausting and tiring work to constantly coach newbies about how to improve their question, because most don't bother to update and oftentimes the only response you get back is &quot;f you why u so mean&quot; types of feedback. Suggestion Whenever a question from a user with less than 50 reputation receives a downvote, automatically generate a comment from the Community user which says:  Welcome to Stack Exchange! You might have noticed your question received a downvote. Voting here is anonymous, but you can find possible reasons for this  as well as suggestions for how to improve your post. You may also find it helpful to read the [FAQ] to better understand what types of questions are on/off topic.  Note the link to &quot;here&quot; can link there or to a more comprehensive &quot;what does it mean when I got downvoted?&quot; post. The [FAQ] link would be to the site on/off topic section. Reason this resolves problem If I downvote a question, I want to help users learn but I am not going to try to search for the diamond in the ruff constantly. I don't think I'm alone in this. Adding customized comments is a lot of work. There are a ton of crap questions posted on SE. Honestly, I don't care that I'm &quot;supposed&quot; to be willing to post personalized, &quot;how to improve your post&quot; comments. It's a pain to constantly put these on questions when the majority of the time they get ignored anyways. Another problem is that if you do post a comment trying to help, you often get attacked by the asker and blamed for all the other downvotes. This is frustrating and not a positive reinforcement. But I will upvote a comment that gets autogenerated as a &quot;support&quot; type of thing, because it is very easy and painless. And, honestly, if someone gets a comment like that explaining how to improve their post and doesn't bother to update their post or request clarification I really, really, really don't care about their feelings being hurt.
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Is there a specific area for new users that are new to coding where they can go and ask questions without being blocked for asking a question they may not have the answer to or isn't sure how to correctly ask a question. I know that there is a section for FAQ to try to explain how to ask a good question but for people who are learning and want to get the opinions of experienced coders, it can be hard to come here and ask a question. So again, is there a community that is open to helping new coders that may not always know how to ask the question they are trying to get an answer to?
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I'm not sure if this is a stupid question, but here goes anyway... I have only recently started learning PHP and Javascript and I'm reasonably proficient. One of the reasons I'm so proficient is because I LOVE Stack Overflow and find most of the solutions to my dilemmas here.   But I've found that I never get the chance to ask a question because it has normally been asked many times before and when I go through the unanswered questions to try and help someone else, they are generally WAY over my head.  So I'm not sure how to get more privileges. I can't even vote up answers that I like or that helped me. I can't comment to thank someone for their solution. It is most tragic and demoralising... How do I change the situation?
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Useful threads are being closed as "not constructive:"     This question is not a good fit to our Q&amp;A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. See the .   For example,  was very useful for me since I am new to obfuscation and the question gave me a start. Also that question has lots of votes and bookmarks - these alone are the  markers of usefulness. The question is closed anyway. No idea why.  Same happened to my question, , which received one bookmark immediately.  I was waiting for an answer with the two products downloaded and installed.  I desired that experienced people would share their thoughts and point me to the better one. No. Closed. I.e. I must go to some other forum and ask there or I must search on Google and write down the pros and cons of each myself. I am not asking questions just because I have tons of time and want to chat; I need an answer, that's why I am asking. I am asking because I think that SO has the most professional people to answer and because I didn't find a good answer in Google.  I saw other questions closed which I myself found to be useful and I bookmarked some of the closed questions.  UPDATE  If I want people who have an experience which I do not have with some software products and I want to see which product is better in the terms of usability and reliability, not just better in terms of the price or has a better official website or better described on the official website, how do I ask this question? Or is this a question which I cannot ask on SO? I.e. this sort of information is not available on SO?  Is this one breaking the rules as well:  ?
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To help users keep track of (and hopefully get answers to) unanswered questions, it would be useful to have an "unanswered" sort order on a user's profile page.  It would order the list of questions with unanswered questions first.   This would be in addition to the "recent," "views," "newest," and "votes" sort orders.
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I recently saw a question on Stack Overflow relating to the . The guy wasn't asking for code at all, meerly asking what the process involved.  It was immediately slapped with a comment directing him to the  (which after reading I still couldn't see why the asker was being directed there), and closed shortly thereafter as "Not a real question".  Since I asked this question, it has been suggested that the question was closed because the asker was asing whether he could ask a question, or because he may have been asking how to unlock his iPhone, where I assumed he was asking for the technical specifics of what happened. Both fair points, it may have been my mistake  As Brad has stated the question  received a very positive response. Another relevant question suggested by Brad, but received a negative response:   Now I know some people out there want to be the Stack Overflow Police, and some people are scared of questions that slightly hint at subversive or underhand methods, or that the asker is trying to do something illegal (either for the sake of the site, or for maintaining their own halos).  However in my opinion it is perfectly acceptable to ask about processes and methods, even in the areas of reverse engineering and programming practicies that are invariably used to exploit other software. Questions like "How do I crack software X?" are obviously unacceptable.  I'd like to know what the community thinks about this; what is your opinion?  Is it ok to ask about shady practices, for educational purposes, as long as they are non-specific (in terms of cacking a certain piece of software, or asking for code to unlock iPhones, etc.)
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I'm trying to go through and provide answers to every unanswered question (search &quot;closed:0 answers:0&quot;), somewhat following the spirit that was blogged about at  .  However, I'm finding this much more difficult than it needs to be, as many of the questions have already been answered without the use of an &quot;answer&quot; - but instead, in the form of a comment by either the OP or another poster. I wouldn't mind reading through and skipping these, as long as there was some appropriate action I could take to at least assist with preventing these questions from being seen again from the same query - either by myself or another SO member.  Is there such an appropriate action?  Should we vote to close?  If so, using what reason? Even if I vote to close, what are the chances that 4 other users will also view the question and also vote to close?  (i.e., will my individual vote even do any good?  Is there any report to show recent close votes, so that others may also review and contribute supporting close votes?) Should we post some sort of an answer - even just something to the effect of &quot;this was already answered by the OP's own comment to his answer (above)&quot;? Would something like this be appropriate to flag for moderator attention, and let the moderators deal with it?  (Or would this be considered too trivial?) Should we rename the question title to something standard that can be used in a search exclusion?  (Maybe &quot;SOLVED:&quot;?)  Basically, how can I help to denote questions as &quot;This question is no longer in active search of an answer - though better answers may still be appreciated.&quot;? I've already reviewed , which was closed as a duplicate of  - but this requires effort on part of a user who may very likely no longer be active. Otherwise, is there something I should be doing to improve my search to filter out these types of questions? I've run across this many times, so I don't consider it to be a rare issue.  However, the last question like this I just ran across, prompting this question, was .  In this case, the question was self-answered by the OP in the form of a comment, this question is the OP's only question, the OP has no other visible activity on SO, and the OP hasn't been seen on SO since he registered and posted the question 5 months ago. Another one I just ran across is .  However, here the &quot;answer&quot; comment was posted by a reputable and recently active SO member.  Should I leave a comment directed at him, asking him to re-post his comment as an answer, or should I post my own answer echoing his comment?  (Or something else?) Yet another is .  Interestingly, the OP actually self-edited the question to include the &quot;SOLVED:&quot; prefix on to the question, instead of posting his resolving comment as an answer (and ideally accepting it) as he was asked to do by another comment.  This brings up another good idea - is there a &quot;standard&quot; we should use to rename the titles on these &quot;resolved but unanswered&quot; posts that could be used as a search exclusion?  (Also added to the above list.)
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This one is more of a netiquette question.  Sometimes I stumble on "unanswered" questions that were actually answered - in their comments. Those questions are shown as unanswered in the statistics.  For example: .  What should be done?   Flag the question so one moderator can somehow mark it as answered. Answer the question yourself (as a community wiki answer), mostly by copying the comments. Nothing. Move along.   EDIT  I'm talking about questions without activity for weeks or months.  Feature request  Give diamond-mods the ability to change a comment to an answer; and allow users to flag for this action.
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On each Stack Exchange site, you find an  section where all unanswered questions or questions with not upvoted answers with be listed. In a blog post  answered. You said:  As of today, here’s how we do it:  Answered Questions have at least one answer with one upvote (or accepted) Unanswered Questions have no answers with upvotes (or accepted)   However, you forgot to include unanswered questions with downvoted answers to the Unanswered Questions instead, the system is labelling them as Answered Questions though the answers are downvoted. I detected the bug when trying to answer a member's question on . It seems also the member had open  about it  on this meta site. Live experiment, when viewing  questions: David's  had a vote of 0:    Then I went to downvote David's , it had a -1 now:    Surprisingly it got removed from the list, and it shouldn't since it is unanswered.
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I think we can all agree, this sucks:  If you've been around a little while, you've probably encountered hundreds of answers like this in various forums, some of them even marked as &quot;The Answer&quot; by well-meaning1 forum admins looking to close a thread. We could try to enumerate the commonly-observed problems with it...  Link is probably broken If link isn't broken, it's spam If link isn't spam, it's to some broadly-related resource that the answerer found by pressing &quot;I'm feeling lucky&quot; when googling the question's title.  ...but the real issue here is that we don't know! Even if the link was originally pointing directly to the most awesomeest answer ever for exactly the question being asked, there's nothing in the answer itself to even hint at what direction we're being pointed in. Strip the markup, and this is what you're left with:  i think you should take The tutorial HERE! This will help you a lot  Is there even one tiny speck of information there? No. Even the title of the page being linked to would have provided something to go on, but that was entirely too much work. So let me be clear: this sort of response is not an answer. If you see this, flag it. Moderators, if you see it flagged, delete it. There's really only one valid exception to this rule, and that's when the question is:  Suggest me some tutorials where i can learn quick.  Don't get me wrong, it's still a bad answer - but when the question is kinda asking for bad answers this is to be expected. Close or flag the question and move on - this is much more efficient than hanging around to babysit it by deleting every crap answer that inevitably shows up. If you're still reading, you're probably getting really bored by now. &quot;Gee, Shog - answers that contain ZERO information are terrible, horrible, very-bad things? What shocking revelations will you share next?&quot; Yeah. It's really simple... Except, . See, the problem is that once you step away from black-and-white &quot;answers / doesn't answer&quot; decision-making, things get... Interesting. And all those other answers with links in them See, this is an answer:  And so is this:  Yes, they're both very short, and yes, they contain links. But strip the markup, and you still get at least a little bit of useful information. Does that mean these answers should forever hang around the site? No, not necessarily - if it turns out they're just not that useful, they should probably still be removed - or at very least, down-voted so that they rank below other answers. Just remember: if the text of the post contains an honest attempt at answering the question, then it is an answer - so don't flag it otherwise, and if you do, don't complain if your flag gets declined. Answers &amp; Apples If you're still confused, forget about answers. Think about apples instead:  Answers are just like that, but less tasty in pies.  1 By which I mean to say, &quot;criminally lazy&quot;
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Problem background  This question is addressed to you, ♦ moderators. There is e.g. , which is full of very useful information. It's been a community wiki with more than 17k views with 51 answers.  The question is off-topic, there's nothing to discuss, but why it was deleted ? Couldn't you just lock it as you did with a several posts around ? The biggest problem is that our community can't even undelete it because it's protected by the ♦ law.  So now it's a community wiki question, which can't be seen nor even undeleted by the community.  Question  Could you undelete that question and let the community decide what to do with it? And if that is possible, could you lock that question to keep its content visible and as it is?    P.S. those reopen votes are there because of curiosity. We shall keep that question closed.