10

Just the opinion of one user here — meant to spur moderator discussion more than anything else.

To good news: As of this writing the Magento Stack Exchange has 2,023 questions, 435 which have no answer. That's about a 78% answered rate, and beats the Stack Overflow magento tag percentage (which is at about 64%).

The bad news: That's still not good enough to get out of beta. I haven't been paying close attention, but anecdotally, every time I check in on the percentage it seems to hover around 75% - 79%. Based on this, and a brief survey of around 50 unanswered questions last night, it seems like the site definition is too broad to get to the — 85%? 90%? — the StackExchange team requires to get out of beta.

That is, while I'm personally loath to greet new users with an automatic close, there's a certain class of questions that are unlikely to be answered, and are therefore bad for the general health of the site.

Is it time to tighten up the sort of questions that are allowed here?

If we could get rid of the "please diagnose my very specific configuration which doesn't occur in stock Magento and is hard to reproduce elsewhere" questions

Magento admin login process problem at first time after installing it.

https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/6132/free-shipping-promotional-rule-for-products-in-certain-category-not-working

https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/6052/button-issues-with-magento-go-admin-theme

Magento/Apache internal redirects hang the server

Missing attributes on product list

Programmatically created attributes showing up in backend but not frontend

https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/4805/magento-1-7-0-2-category-tree-does-not-auto-expand-in-product-edit-page

Products not showing up in frontend or backend but are enabled and stored correctly in flat table

https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/6132/free-shipping-promotional-rule-for-products-in-certain-category-not-working

Or the "I'm lonely/frustrated and want someone to pair program with" questions

Remove tax from the invoice pdf

Related Products Trick: A -> B && B -> A

Product attribute not saving programmatically programmatically

Check if coupon is valid for a quote

implementing xcache to speed up magento

https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/6194/jquery-animation-in-template-is-not-working

https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/6178/adding-attachment-in-contact-form

comparing form data with database

Register user product review not reflecting in My account section

Or the "hey we actually answered this in the question body or comments but not in an answer" questions

Magmi image import sets majority of product images, but not all

Paypal shipping address errors

https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/5721/problem-in-retreiving-data-from-xml

https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/4733/change-order-state

Preview items are showing in search

Anyone managed to upgrade to EE 1.13 and keep the old urls in place?

It seems like we could get that percentage up in no time.

8
  • Thanks Alan. I'm going through your list. Highly appreciated !!
    – Tim Bezhashvyly Mod
    Commented Jul 30, 2013 at 20:15
  • I just consulted with SE moderators, closed questions are excluded from answered ratio calculation. So your idea really makes sense. I'm going through your list and will sort it in next 24 hours. Thank a lot!
    – Tim Bezhashvyly Mod
    Commented Jul 30, 2013 at 20:26
  • 3
    Three cheers (three beers?) for Alan Storm!
    – benmarks Mod
    Commented Jul 30, 2013 at 22:49
  • I went through your list and closed some of the questions. Many questions are not that bad but I will go through the list once again with a fresh head. Thanks again for the bold of work you did.
    – Tim Bezhashvyly Mod
    Commented Jul 31, 2013 at 22:15
  • @Tim Address the specific questions is great, but I was wondering if there's some sort of general policy changes/rules we could implement to discourage certain question types that are unlikely to ever be answered.
    – Alana Storm
    Commented Jul 31, 2013 at 23:42
  • Is this site for programmers only, i.e. a subset of stackoverflow users? Or are you going to allow barely computer literate people to post questions here?
    – Buttle Butkus
    Commented Aug 26, 2013 at 5:35
  • @ButtleButkus Not sure if you're being snarky or not, but the Magento StackOverflow Area51 was pretty explicit about this being a site for programmers, system administrators, and site users.
    – Alana Storm
    Commented Aug 26, 2013 at 5:37
  • @AlanStorm No not being snarky. I clicked the "about" link and saw this: "Magento Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of the Magento e-Commerce platform." I'm not sure where Area51 is.
    – Buttle Butkus
    Commented Aug 26, 2013 at 5:42

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7

(as always) You are absolutely right. We need a stricter rules for posting lame questions. Of course (as always) it's almost impossible to compile some requirements which will be good for all the variety of cases. However (as always) we can try. Here is my proposition:

  • The issue has to be well described. Something more then "my promotion rules are not working. what's wrong?"
  • OP has to show at least minimal effort of solving issue by himself. Something more then "i googled but found nothing".
  • In most cases it's absolutely important to put a tag with Magneto version (e.g. ce-1.4.1.1, ee-1.10.2.0), note that caches were flushed and indexes refreshed, logging enabled and list the errors there or state their absence.

The questions which are lacking anything of listed above can be put "on-hold" until the required information is provided by OP.

Did I (as always) miss anything?

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .