68

Every day people stumble in here, either drunk or oblivious or maliciously, and drop off-topic questions. Like clockwork, before their question is closed and deleted, one or more well-meaning folks will direct them and their crap question to another website on the StackExchange network.

Can we please stop doing this? Everybody?

Almost every single one of these questions is terrible. Here's the latest example

enter image description here

I don't mean this as an attack on the well-meaning user in this example, or to any of the well meaning members who try to help by acting as a signpost. I'd be willing to wager that every single one of us has done this one or more times in the past. We're all dirty. Let's take a shower. All together at once. It won't be creepy, I swear.

We really don't need to tell people who can't be bothered to ask a decent on-topic question where they need to go in order to inflict their fail on us. Downvote, vote to close, and vote to delete. Tell them they are off topic and ask them to review the help section or even visit the main StackExchange website, if you must.

But please, please don't tell them where to go. Make them figure it out for themselves. They may actually learn something in the process. Ah, hell, who am I fooling? I hope they get lost and find themselves on Quora. Whatever. As long as they aren't stinking up the place anymore.

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    Also note that a decent number of such users are posting on meta in the first place because they're question banned on the site they should be asking it on. – Servy May 22 '15 at 16:25
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    Oh, for the days when these folks would get random's unique brand of poetry. – Brad Larson May 22 '15 at 16:26
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    I already wrote a nice an extensive comment for how asker should improve his question, but the question was deleted before I could submit my comment. :-( – JonasCz - Reinstate Monica May 22 '15 at 16:30
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    Hmm, we'll never get him question-banned if we don't tell him to post his garbage in the right place. – Hans Passant May 22 '15 at 16:32
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    Damnit, where's the downvote comment button? – user1228 May 22 '15 at 16:45
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    Shouldn't we just answer the question with 42. it is the answers to life, the universe and everything. – NathanOliver May 22 '15 at 16:50
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    @NathanOliver I despise 42 jokes, so probably not ಠ_ಠ – user1228 May 22 '15 at 16:56
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    @NathanOliver Stack Exchange version of 42 is Which computer science / programming Stack Exchange do I post in? (note how in there, links to various sites land on help centers of these sites) – gnat May 22 '15 at 17:03
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    Let's take a shower. All together at once. It won't be creepy, I swear. My reaction: ಠ_ಠ – Compass May 22 '15 at 17:47
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    Amen. I even have a comment snippet for this situation: Please don't try to redirect a programming question to Stack Overflow when it's not a good question in the first place, @<##>. That doesn't help anyone. At least link to [How to Ask](http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask) or maybe the [Stack Overflow question checklist](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/156810). – jscs May 22 '15 at 19:26
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    Would you like some toast? Some nice hot crisp brown buttered toast. No? No, wait, that's what I wanted to ask, why there is the android tag on Meta anyway (there is the android-app for the SE Android app.)? I know that it won't discourage everyone (that some might be happy to use just support), but still... – TLama May 23 '15 at 9:32
  • Are you referring to my comment ? Unfortunately I can't edit after 5 minuites... – JonasCz - Reinstate Monica May 23 '15 at 17:18
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    Why not redirect him to a site that is appropriate, like toastbasedtelephony.stackexchange.com? Sure, that site doesn't exist yet, because there aren't enough questions on toast-based telephony to justify a SE site—or maybe there are, but nobody has realized it yet. If that's a problem that needs to be remedied, the page gives clear instructions to the user on how to get started on that. When we realize how many people are trying to burn incoming call notifications onto their bread, we will create a site, right? – abarnert May 24 '15 at 19:00
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    Are you feeling alright, Will? This question appears to be a rant. – Lightness Races in Orbit May 25 '15 at 13:50
41

Once in a blue moon, someone actually posts a decent programming question here. This one, for instance, is actually a mildly interesting question, one that I could see being well-answered and useful to others in the future - and I'm glad the asker found his way back to the main site and re-asked it, and I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from pointing the way for good questions when they do appear here in error.

That said, a decent question posted here by mistake is a rare thing indeed. I straight-up delete the rest; one of the perks of being an employee is that I don't even have to close them. I fully support your "point these folks to Quora" strategy for the vast bulk of programming questions asked here.

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    Ah, sorry. Here it is: stackoverflow.com/q/30378758 – Robert Harvey May 23 '15 at 0:19
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    Back in college, I drove a newspaper delivery truck. One Saturday night, while waiting in the alley near the press chutes for my load of Sunday's, I was approached by an extremely inebriated fellow who wanted to know "how to get to Dee Tops". I asked him to repeat himself several times before giving up and sending him in the direction of the City/County building with the po-po and the jail. As I loaded my truck, and repeated the story to the dock supervisor, I realized that he had been asking how to get to detox. Maybe these people are asking how to get to Quora. Or expert sex change. – GlenRSmith May 24 '15 at 2:03
36

This was me. By directing them back to regular SO I wanted to give the user the opportunity to ask again. This could have two results:

  1. The user asks the same question again and gets downvoted into oblivion. The question is closed and we move on.

  2. The question is downvoted but users coach the asker on how to ask a better question.

Did I not provide the most helpful comment? Maybe. Should I have linked to the Help section? Absolutely. But I don't see why directing them back to SO was damaging.

By bringing this up, you have now suggested to me (and other users) of a better way of handling this kind of situation. So thanks for that.

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  • 6
    Gah, that question was deleted and at most only a handful of folks would have known or been able to track you down. Again, this isn't meant to be an attack on you or anybody who does this. And pointing off topic users to SO happens almost daily here. You did nothing wrong, strictly speaking. I would like to try and get people to stop doing it from this point on, if everybody agrees. This question can be posted in a reply to these types of comments as a way of reminding folks that the practice is discouraged. Please don't take it personally. – user1228 May 22 '15 at 16:35
  • No problem, I just wanted to explain my reasoning. If people agree that we shouldn't do this anymore that's fine. It just needs to be documented somewhere so people (like me) see it. – JAL May 22 '15 at 16:37
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    There is tons of crap posted on SO. Way, way more than the community is capable of polishing into good questions. It takes an enormous amount of effort to hold someone's hand through the process of turning a bad question into a good one, and even then it often doesn't happen because the OP just isn't interested in improving. There's simply no shortage of crap that people could improve, if they're looking for a question to try to save. Most questions like these just get closed, deleted, or sit there fermenting. Adding one more isn't helping the community. – Servy May 22 '15 at 16:40
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    I thinking pointing them to the main SO site is fine, even for crap questions, but certainly in this case it could have done with a "oh, and also make sure you improve your question, since as it stands it will be closed because it's far too broad. See: [some help link]" – Martin Tournoij May 23 '15 at 19:05
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    @Carpetsmoker: The point Servy (and by extension the OP) is making is that you're just wasting your breath by doing that. – BoltClock May 25 '15 at 7:25
9

The problem isn't the low quality questions being passed around, it's that for some reason, people think Meta is the place to ask these kinds of questions. We shouldn't stop pointing people to the right place, because this isn't the right place.

We need to make it more clear that Meta is a different kind of site, maybe automate the way you can move things around easier, on sites like this.

We can't be shutting people down because they don't know how to use a site they've never participated in. In a perfect world, they'd all know, but we need to deal with what we've got here.

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    Just like we should not MIGRATE crap, we shouldn't tell people where to POST crap. Again, if you refer back to the last paragraph of my question, forcing them to figure it out themselves makes them learn. By posting here, they show they didn't give a crap enough about us and this community to get even the simplest task right. Forcing them to figure it out on their own is the minimum they owe us. – user1228 May 24 '15 at 17:04
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    @Will The goal of the stack exchange network is to build a compendium of knowledge; it's a resource, not a community. – Cypher May 24 '15 at 18:48
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    @Cypher it is a community. It's made of people. To claim it is not is to deny reality. Also, your statement about the goal of SE supports my argument. – user1228 May 24 '15 at 19:08
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    @Will I don't care about you. I don't care about this community. It's a resource and I value it as such. Expecting anything else of others is to deny reality. See what I did there? :) – Cypher May 24 '15 at 20:18
  • @Cypher I don't care about you either, pal. Cheers! :-D – deceze May 25 '15 at 14:58

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