Thursday, August 21, 2008

Stack Overflow: Question Overload

I have noticed that some people don't necessarily put a lot of thought into their questions. What I have been wondering, is how to discourage some of the pointless questions.

One idea I came up with is for the asking of a question, which does not get any up votes, actually reduce the reputation of the person asking. Of course I would not want people overly discouraged from asking a question, just the pointless ones. So essentially what I'm thinking is that you would essentially put your reputation on the line with every question you ask. This would also have the added benefit that the users asking questions would put more thought into every question they write, so that someone would be more likely to come along and give them an up vote.

Another idea I have come up with is what if someone decides they no longer want their reputation tied to a particular question. What would be the procedures involved? I thought that they could release a particular question, that would then go into a holding area. Once in this holding area, you would have the positive, or negative reputation, discounted from your own reputation. You probably would want to limit the activities that could occur, in association with that question. Also what if you decide that you want to assign the question, back to the account it was originally assigned?

No comments: