There are so many times I’ve tried to look up an answer to a technical problem I had. And I click the top result and it’s a forum post. Someone asked the exact question I was looking for, and every reply is: “already answered,” “learn to use the search box,” and “wow your’e dubm for not already knowing this you n00b.”
Search engine doesn’t know, it just sees a thread with the search terms and lots of engagement so it becomes the top search result. I wish everyone who acted that way on forums a very pleasant long walk down a very short pier.
On the one hand I agree with them because having a Q&A site full of repetitive beginner questions will ruin its usefulness as a resource. On the other hand they handle it in the worst possible way. Instead of leaving around a bunch of “corpses” of closed questions they should just merge the beginner’s question into the original, already answered question. Just n
Move it to the bottom of that question’s discussion thread and redirect the beginner to the answer at the top.
The way they decided to do it essentially codifies all the things people hated about asking for help on IRC and later Discord.
Already answered, closed
There are so many times I’ve tried to look up an answer to a technical problem I had. And I click the top result and it’s a forum post. Someone asked the exact question I was looking for, and every reply is: “already answered,” “learn to use the search box,” and “wow your’e dubm for not already knowing this you n00b.”
Search engine doesn’t know, it just sees a thread with the search terms and lots of engagement so it becomes the top search result. I wish everyone who acted that way on forums a very pleasant long walk down a very short pier.
If closing as “already answered” it should really be "already answered by [link to other thread]
On the one hand I agree with them because having a Q&A site full of repetitive beginner questions will ruin its usefulness as a resource. On the other hand they handle it in the worst possible way. Instead of leaving around a bunch of “corpses” of closed questions they should just merge the beginner’s question into the original, already answered question. Just n Move it to the bottom of that question’s discussion thread and redirect the beginner to the answer at the top.
The way they decided to do it essentially codifies all the things people hated about asking for help on IRC and later Discord.
Yeah, I like how gitlab/hub issues link to the merged issue.
POV you’ve just clicked on the only relevant-looking search result:
“Duplicate question, use search.”