Generic answers for questions

Question

I spent some time looking at unaswered questions tagged magento on Stackoverflow and I noticed the following:

• off-topic/duplicate questions
• vaguely defined questions
• questions I didn't understand (issues with English language)
• programming questions asked by "developers" with no programming experience
• "How can I do this" type of questions without trying first to solve it themselves
• Specific frontend questions asked by "developers" that didn't at least look at their page with Template Path hints on

These questions will show up in this website and I have the following suggestions:

• We should be able to provide links to resources about basic Magento Development (example: Magento Knowledgebase, various blogs, and so on);
• If the question is not clearly defined, point them to a guide about how to ask a question (if they have issues with the language, then ecourage them to use images to describe what they want)
• If a Magento programming question is asked by someone with no programming experience, the answer should be: learn how to code first, then we can help you, here are some links/resources

My opinion is that a detailed specific answer doesn't help at all. They will "copy-paste" the answer if someone provides it and that's the end, moving on, next question.

Answer 1

I will just focus my answer to "duplicates".

There is a functionality to flag question and provide a link to duplicate question which was answered before. What I see on Stackoverflow is, that even if I flag questions, mods didn't do anything and there were still copy/paste answers provided by users.

On my opinion, we should definitely close a duplicate question and link it to the original one. I would also explicitly write to users (when posting questions) to use the search before posting. It would save time for everyone.

I mostly agree with your other opinions.