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Growing number of unresolved questions

A whole lot of the questions in unresolved are IMHO properly answered, but the one who asked never came back or just forgot to accept the answer. This way they are still in unresolved and you have to dig for really unresolved questions. To find unanswered questions is easy, just click on "no answers"

So i like to suggest that answered but not accepted questions stay in unresolved for, lets say, two month.

After that they change status to orphaned and after another two month the answer gets auto accepted.

Before the answer changes status the user should get a e-mail to log in and check a box to keep his question in unresolved for another two month.

I like to help people to repair their stuff, where to find information how to do it or even what might be the problem.

The unresolved questions is a good place to find answered questions with answers that might not fit.

What i don't like is to dig in IMHO properly answered questions of people who doesn't seem to be interessted in getting an answer. Because some questions are still in unresolved for nearly half a year and if these questions are not answered the way the user want's to after that time, i have to say sorry, there is no other answer and move on.

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Well put.

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I have to agree. A number of times I have had a OP thank me for solving their problem but fail to mark the question solved. I'm happy I was able to help but it would be nice to see the question closed. + Ralph

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This is an interesting discussion. FYI, the definition of unresolved is a question that does not have any answers with one upvote. So if it has been answered, just vote up the answer and the question will be removed from the unresolved list.

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Do we really have to go trough 140 pages of unresolved questions and give upvotes, just to get them out of the way? ;-)

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If we each do a few it will go quickly. N.

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So we do send an email out to remind users to come back and accept answers. We send it three days after they initially ask their question. Currently we are not tracking how often users actually follow those links and whether or not that email is coming too soon.

As for upvoting, I feel there is a a general lack of voting throughout the site. I really think everyone should be voting more questions, and more answers up, but that is just me.

All in all though, I do agree that we have too many unresolved questions. I'm curious if this tab is even useful to our users, thoughts?

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3 Comments:

I've mostly used it to find questions needing answers (not necessarily with no answers), but now I pretty much just see abandoned questions there.

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Me too! I don't know if to upvote a answer, to get rid of it, is the answer. And as for upvoting, i can only upvote an answer or question when i know what they're talking about. As example, i dont have a clue about Mac's and MacBooks. So i can't upvote anything, if i don't know if the answer was good or not.

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Sorry for the late reply, but I feel that if I can't upvote the answer, I downvote it and leave a comment. That way I am now following the post incase it does get a solid answer that I can upvote, or gets edited so I can change my vote.

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So I've been working on the backlog

and ran into a problem... a time limit on posting "answers"?!

Seems "I answered too many questions in 5 minutes".

I've been posting

Post more details

or delete your question! to questions that were vague and had comments asking for more information, but were months old.

I've been up voting old posts and cleared a couple of pages. And I've also flagged OT posts to the administrator (taking the "hit" to my reputation)

'''But I don't understand the time limit... can anything be done about this?

'''

N

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8 Comments:

One more fly in the ointment: You have run out of upvotes for the day. Users with less than 10 reputation can only vote 15 times a day, while everyone else gets 50 votes per day.

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So the flags apparently dropped my reputation and I was done clearing "dead" questions. N.

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+ thanks for your heroic stance. It takes a Man to stand for what is right and "full speed ahead, damed the torpedos".

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+ for the effort. Please consider my request to add the word please. Ralph

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So been gone for a couple of months and still see 261 pages of Unresolved Questions and 72 Unanswered Questions. Can moderators delete questions asked months ago with comments asking for more information that were never answered? I figure No follow up=No longer interested in finding an Answer, so why not just clean them up?

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You're absolutely right, this is a big issue. I really appreciate @machead3's proactive approach. He's running into some rate-limiting bugs with the system we put in place to prevent spammers from taking over the site. I'm actively investigating those.

I think that answers should be reserved for actual information. If I landed on that question, how can / should I vote on his generic 'Post more details' answer?'

I propose an alternate solution: Vote the question down, and leave a brief comment saying that you can't answer the question without more information. (If possible, link to a similar question that has been answered because it had more details.)

Once a question's score drops below two, we'll change our algorithm to remove it from the Unresolved questions list. If the user does edit the question and adds more information, it's easy to reverse the vote.

What are downvotes good for, if not to call out unanswerable questions?

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That actually sounds like a really good idea.

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And that actually should have some immediate results, seeing as pretty much most of those poorly worded questions have a few downvotes.

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And what about the unresolved question with an answer, the upvote method ?

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@Kyle: did you mean "drops below two" or "drops below negative two". I am of the opinion that questions should appear on the Unresolved tab by default, and so the threshold for them to drop off should be negative two.

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Crisb will be eternally grateful.