Hi there. The suggestion for a more structured Ask process is a valid one. I’m not sure if we’ll ever make it as structured as Stack Overflow, but we may take it more in that direction. Poor quality questions help nobody, and I appreciate everything you all do to fix or remove low-effort posts. We have some automated tasks on our side to try to prompt askers to improve their questions when they don’t receive responses. That said, there are a few differences between Stack Overflow and iFixit that make it a little more complex.
At iFixit, one of our goals is to make repair accessible to everyone, including less technical people than SO would tolerate. Unfortunately, that means we get a lot of duplicate or unanswerable questions from people unfamiliar with the process of asking for help online. I really appreciate that our community has set a standard of politeness and respect well above what I expect from SO or really any other online community. We have well over a 50:1 upvote to downvote ratio on iFixit, and that says a lot about how positive and helpful our community has been to these types of posts. But the fact remains that low-effort unanswerable posts waste the valuable time of our answerers and moderators while also distracting new users looking for help with the same problem. All that to say, if you see a question of low-enough quality, don’t hesitate to downvote it or delete it outright.
Many of our new users come to iFixit after Googling their problem. The least helpful thing we can do is send them to an unanswerable version of their question. We make a huge effort on our side to give Google the best quality questions we can, but that depends in large part on the humans of our community voting, moderating, marking duplicates, and fixing spelling mistakes, especially in titles.
Anyway, thanks for for the suggestion. I can’t say that we’ll make the Ask process identical to SO’s, but this issue is on our radar! I appreciate what you all do to keep the site helpful, friendly, and junk-free. Keep up the good work!
