Large amount of threads left unanswered...

Simple answer jeremy. You cannot.

You have done your best to promote this. Yet there are limited number of people answering real questions.

The reason is not because of limited knowledge. It is one of difficulty in diagnosing/comprehending and providing a working solution when you are not anywhere near the problem.

The forum works best when users with first-hand prior experience can come forward and answer based on our own experience. 99% of the time, I could answer questions only based on personal experience. And a lot of the time, solutions are feasible only if the configuration of the problem matches the two ends (the questioner and the answerer). The more experience I gain, therefore, the more I am able to answer. However, just as a doctor sometimes needs to see the patient and even examine him thoroughly before passing a diagnosis, some problems are not mere common colds. They might be something more subtle and deeper. Unfortunately unlike doctors, we forum members don't have direct access to our patients (if you'll forgive the analogy ).

And unfortunately there is a limit, however large, to the collective personal experience of members on a forum.

Diagnosing a new problem or one that is outside our normal experience is well beyond the scope of most users in an online forum because of limited access to reproducing and recreating and then solving a problem especially when the problem definition is rather vague or random. For this reason most hardware problems are difficult to answer (of course, pointing a link to a driver is a different thing) and so are many software problems. It is easiest to answer questions that ask for resources. It is very difficult to answer questions where the problem has to be reproduced at my end... And to add to it all, Linux is so different across different installation and distributions. For one, problems which depend on human beings to be present on location to solve them are almost impossible to answer in an online forum.

Why then wonder that so many posts remain unanswered? For one, I know that I am very hesitant to mislead or provide a false solution. Rather than mislead and then confuse, I always feel that it's better not to reply. I'm sure a lot of other people are hesitant too on advising when they're not sure. It's human nature after all not to want to display your mistakes and errors in public and run the risk of ruining another person's machine in the bargain.

The parallel and compounding problem is that many newbies tend to have high expectations assuming that we are psychic mind-readers and that the community can somehow magically solve all their problems. Of late I have noticed an attitude problem with quite a few newcomers as well and felt more defensive and refrained from posting solutions when I didn't feel 100% sure that I'm on the right track.

The problem lies not with LQ, the help-seekers or its excellent volunteer community, but with the medium: the web. On the web, one can only do so much to find a solution to a particular problem. One must accept that as human beings, sometimes third parties cannot fix problems that cannot be directly seen or experienced and this is a general thing in life. Not just Linux or computers.

For example, I cannot solve many computer related issues just by hearing the description of it on the telephone. Often I find that I have to be on location to diagnose it. Think of the web as something similar.

In spite of this, we have a fairly good question/answer ratio and I'm glad that LQ has achieved so much in the past 5 years.

Keep it up.

P.S. It would be well for me and everybody else to remember that the number of replied threads does not reflect on the number of solved problems nor does the number of unreplied ones necessarily correspond to the number of unsolved problems.

I have just had a thought. Long overdue, I know Why not do a "themed 0 reply answer session"? For example, gather all unanswered questions which have Nvidia as the problem, and create a place for them or a search link or somesuch.

Most of the unanswered questions will be, IMO, practically identical. Getting them all in one place will make it easy to compare the questions and we could probably knock off a huge number of said questions in a few sessions.

This would only apply to questions older than a month and younger than 6 months, or we'll all be trying to answer out of date/obsolete questions. It could also be helpful to people just turning up to find that there is a place with a number of answers on one subject.

By doing this, we should then be left with the genuinely tricky/obscure questions and the just plain poorly worded questions which can be dealt with at greater length.

Any thoughts?

An interesting idea XavierP - let me look into an implementation.

--jeremy

This feature will be available in a future version of the code.

--jeremy

Cheers Jeremy! I'm quite impressed by how this thread has been going - I only realized last night how many people had posted. Glad to know that Jeremy's going to make life easier for us Thank you very much (XavierP for the idea, and Jeremy for accepting it)! Yours,

J_K9

P.S Feel free to close the thread whenever you want to

FWIW, I've posted a few questions in the forums as sorta test questions. Precisely to see whether I might find LQ helpful, intimidating, or encounter a bunch of rude elitists. If you search my posts, you may find a few that could lead to a donnybrook or two

I really was curious about the subjects, but still, all new guys want to know if a NG (ugg!), chat room (wear protection), or moderated forum will suit their personality, or that of the senior patrons ,right?

I'm really new, and I knew some of my questions have been answered elsewhere, but I was pleasantly surprised by the nature of the replies. With only one exception (that being I didn't know what I was talking about, it appears), everyone here has been most helpful and polite. I'm guessing this is true of the entire Linux world, and it's the main reason I'm going gung ho for Linux.

What a refreshing change from the ego pissing contests on the news groups!

Great site, and thanks to all who make it that way

I know I mentioned this elsewhere on this site but I can't find it anymore (deleted?).

Anyhow, Jeremy says there will be new code coming... so here goes.

I know that when I post to a thread I receive an email whenever there is a reply, so my idea was,
that LQ should implement code to send an email to posters who have had no reply for a given time (say one week).

This should be automated and these people should be asked whether their question is still relevant, so as to avoid
having a lot of postings hanging around which had already been resolved by the poster looking around LQ or elsewhere.

If a reply came back saying they were no longer relevant, these postings could be simply deleted.
In fact they should be deleted if there is no response to repeated (say 3) emails.

What do you think? That's my worth...

I'm not sure we should be deleting them but I am in favour of sending an e-mail to people sugesting that they should come back and provide more information about the problem or sharing a fix if they have found it. This would obviously need to be limited to people who allow e-mails to be sent but I think it would be a nice addition.

I agree with David on both points. We don't want to delete posts, but sending a reminder to members in the right circumstances may not be a bad idea. Let me think about implementation details. Thanks for the suggestion.

--jeremy

i had kind of a weird idea, not sure if it's even possible to implement. but the idea was to have a "virtual forum" for the 0 replies threads that would show up in the forums list. iow, when you clicked on the "forum" it would take you to the same place you go when you click the "View Threads w/ 0 Replies" at the top, but conceptualizing it as an actual "place," like the software forum, the general forum, etc. might make people more prone to "hang out" there.

people would need to be discouraged from posting there, of course, or maybe that could be set up with software to block posts, since it wouldn't be a "real" forum anyway. even if not, though, the post would have no replies when it was first made anyway, so at least it would be in the right forum. i'm joking, but i hope you get the idea.

personally, i usually just hit the "View new threads" link and browse that way, but sometimes i go to the forums list, like when i want to go directly to debian or see what's happening in security, etc. as i said, it might seem like a weird idea to have a "forum" that isn't really a forum, but actually it would just be another way to increase exposure for the 0 replies link, in effect like making a symbolic link to it (so maybe when someone tried to post there, actually it would say, "sorry, there are too many levels of symbolic links" ).

or maybe it wouldn't matter at all, i just thought i would "brainstorm" that out there. feel free to ridicule.

come to think of it, if the "forum" link were just a link to the 0 replies threads, you couldn't post there like you could in an actual forum anyway. so that concern is moot, at least.

but aside from promotion/ advertising/ exposure, etc., imho the only other way to increase participation is some sort of reward system. something like (just for example) everytime you successfully answer a 0 reply post that's been there for 72hrs. or longer, you increase your post count by two instead of one (for people who care about the post count thing ). or some other kind of reward, e.g., if you have 20 successful replies to 0 reply posts you get an LQ t-shirt or something.

those ideas are more complicated to implement, with questions about what constitutes "successful answering" of the post (esp. if the OP doesn't post back to say it worked ), how to keep track of all of it, would it take too much time and resources of the mods to monitor, could it be automated somehow, etc. but other than rewards, i think it's hard to motivate people much more than over a certain baseline. polite requests, frequent reminders and repeated hints only tend to go so far.

The "0 Replies" link ( http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...n=norepliesall ) is for all intents and purposes a virtual forum.

--jeremy

Speaking for myself:

If a thread says "urgent need help" or "linux question" or something else equally non-descriptive of the topic, I rarely ever bother to read the thread. Likewise, if a thread is something like "how do I play DVDs" or "how do I create partitions" that a search or reading the stickies would have answered immediately, I rarely ever bother to reply, unless the user indicates they've done so and are still stuck.

Thread topics I noticed today and ignored

partimage (is this praise? a new release? a problem with it? I couldn't be bothered to find out)
Slackware 11.0 (what about it? New release? Trying to install it? Love it? Hate it? don't know, won't bother to read the thread.)
X Problems (what kind of problems? Installation? Cannot connect to screen 0?)
eth0 (What ABOUT ethernet and why should I read the thread?)
SuSE problem (SuSE is a HUGE distribution with thousand of packages. Is the problem with the kernel? Xine? YaST? Quanta+? Who knows, who cares?)
Firewalls (Yes you should run a firewall when on a public network. What about firewalls? What's your point?)
media players (yes I have several installed and they work great. I don't know what your post is about based on the topic, so I won't open the thread)


See, I'd probably make the time to try to help some of these people if they bother to use descriptive topic headings, but if they're too lazy to type in a descriptive topic heading, they are probably too lazy to follow directions and will want keystroke-by-keystroke directions, so based on that I avoid wasting time reading threads with meaningless topic headings.

Maybe I'm a little too harsh, but I don't think so.

Good point KimVette, and no, I don't think you were to harsh.

man XavierP, what an idea. Great!

Umm... KimVette, I tend to find myself in the opposite category- I get a kick out of showing them that the answers are out there- all they need to do is search- and then they feel a great "yay! they answered my question" AND learn to do it right.

great thread btw.
titanium_geek