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Since the magento forum went on read only mode and all (most of) the traffic was redirected here the quality of questions and some answers really dropped.
Some of us really worked to get the answer percentage to a 80+ value just to see it go down again in a few days.
Since this How shall we treat Magmi related questions? appeared on meta I assumed that a lot of questions about 3rd party modules will be closed as off-topic, but that's not the case.
And then User/Application Questions appeared on meta and I don't know anymore where to draw the line between what's allowed and what not.

I'm afraid that the quality of this website will go down even more in the very near future.
I'm looking now at the homepage and see only 2 accepted answers from 50 questions.

Any ideas on how to improve this? I'm all out.

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    Downvote bad questions. Cast your close votes. Do that with passion. Do that before thinking about actually answering. Do not leave comments, just tell them to go away. They will moan. They will beg. They will cry.
    – hakre
    Commented Jul 16, 2014 at 16:43
  • The close votes are limited per day :(
    – Marius Mod
    Commented Jul 16, 2014 at 19:24
  • So are the downvotes. If it takes overhand, call for moderation.
    – hakre
    Commented Jul 16, 2014 at 20:22
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    @hakre makes sense to post your comment as an answer.
    – Tim Bezhashvyly
    Commented Jul 17, 2014 at 7:21

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So I will refer you to the stackexchange wall of motivation:

Help Improve The Site

Magento Stack Exchange is moderated by you.

Help your fellow members learn to use the site and raise the quality of Q&A by:

Evaluating new posts

Voting to close or reopen questions

Reviewing suggested edits

With the current amount of "moderators", with this term I mean not just the chosen few the the title but anyone who flags, closes, edits or simply up votes, I think that the site will dip in terms of quality at least in the short term.

It will take a while for the site to get back to a "good" level with the amount of people we have actively sorting posts to sort out this website. What we can hope for is that what we do effects some people and that these people in tern help us out in moderation and so the number of little helpers will increase and thus the site's quality will increase.

At the start it will be a long and thankless task but it will get better over time. But Marius if you are at Meet Magento in Romania I will thank you personally with a drink or two.

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    .. so I drank one it became four ..
    – Tim Bezhashvyly
    Commented Jul 17, 2014 at 7:26
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    Very motivational answer. I will make a screenshot of this so I will have proof that you owe me a drink...or two. If nothing unpredictable comes up, I'll see you there.
    – Marius Mod
    Commented Jul 17, 2014 at 7:39
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    it is actually quite disappointing to see that some of the new people in here just can't google simple things ...
    – Julien Lachal
    Commented Jul 17, 2014 at 12:41
  • The same for Meet Magento Belarus, will love to see you here probably with a speech 'How to Manage Community QA sites'
    – Amasty
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 8:33
  • Julien, to a point, that position is understandable. The issue is with the quality of the Magento dev. answers in the Wild Wild Web. While with mageOverflow, there is at least a site, with a working system, based on Q&A being reviewed by seasoned devs in the field, many of whom wrote the articles, that google so generously offers. And here you get up to date replies, re-reviewed between peers... (imo) This is of special value to newbies /interns - having all those trivial answers, gathered and moderated in one place, in such way.
    – someGuyOnTheWeb
    Commented Jul 28, 2014 at 20:14
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Downvote bad questions. Cast your close votes. Do that with passion. Do that before thinking about actually answering. Do not leave comments, just tell them to go away. They will moan. They will beg. They will cry.

Each site is different, but in the prospect to be filled with support related question from a popular project (which even lost it's public support forum in a working state), you need to keep things cleared if you don't want to get swamped. If - but only if - experienced moderators from that forum would also join and have Q&A site experience - then you could actually start to think about if you want to lower the bar for entry-level questions.

But I only know it from the Stackoverflow main site: Not encouraging more active members to downvote puppies and no mercy strict rules where you smell the lazyness by the OP (that is basically: OP shows no commitment (nothing - nada) and has no motivation at all to become a member, having a model that this is a site curated together).

The Wordpress SE site had more strict rules and I think this went pretty well. But the mods there were taking care of such issues. We also had some posters which did "charming to death" answers, that were just perfectly written and outlined in the very beginning so that it was clear that the site itself aims for high-standards generally.

Also by Wordpress SE, the normal Wordpress Support forums weren't closed. I can really only warn to ignore your own feelings where you see problems arise. Just be snappy and distinct that you don't want to have a shit-flow into the site.

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  • "Do that with passion" love it!
    – David Manners
    Commented Jul 17, 2014 at 9:14
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I'm bored by the questions. No details what the problem is, I don't get a sense what they tried. And StackExchange is about question for the public, NOT solve my or your problem.

Magento StackExchange CAN NOT be a replacement for the forums - if you ask me. I'm bored by the people who tell us, they don't have any clue about php and want to change magento.

I don't like what Magento StackExchange is at the moment. I vote for close fast, close often.

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  • I did used to see a lot more "what have you tried" comments than now.
    – David Manners
    Commented Jul 19, 2014 at 9:21
  • Same sentiment here. I'm at a point where I feel comfortable answering questions, but when I look at all of these incoherent and 3-sentence questions with a huge copy-and-paste, I either skip or start typing an answer.. only to just close the page because I'm wondering if the poster will even respond.
    – laketuna
    Commented Dec 9, 2014 at 3:25
  • I am quite new to magento and I really wonder what users might be doing here. The amount of useless questions and especially useless answers is just unbelievable! A good 80% of the answers I checked today should be deleted because they are either 1) a comment 2) wrong 3) maybe correct but not for the version mentioned by OP, etc. etc. Where are moderators here?
    – MrUpsidown
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 16:15
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Don't forget that this site was created to help users as well as developers. You may not remember the first time you hit upon a Stack* site, but I believe that even my first "answer" was a comment and was (rightly) closed. Stack takes awhile to get used to.

Magento SE will not be the forum replacement for Magento's defunct forums, so perhaps this problem will be short-lived.

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  • If you give your word I'll take it. :)
    – Marius Mod
    Commented Jul 17, 2014 at 18:49
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thats something which evolves with time, the ones who create questions today are maybe the ones who answer tomorrow.

In any case, its not a Solution to reduce the amount of Questions, actually I was quite disappointed back then, that many community members supported the solution to delete questions for the 80% answered goal.

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  • I would like to put the focus on the some in something. For a little fraction you're right I'm pretty sure, but the question remains if those wouldn't have come here anyway. Deleting question by metrics sounds weird to me, too.
    – hakre
    Commented Jul 16, 2014 at 16:51
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    I'm not aiming for 80...I'm going for 90 :). Just kidding, of course the stats are nice to have, but this was not the point. I was talking about low quality questions, or hit & run.
    – Marius Mod
    Commented Jul 16, 2014 at 19:23
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Just a newcomer thought: I believe techie askers don't have the basic debugging skills to try to solve their problems, and also since merchants came by the kind of questions asked vary, and are broad enough to make OP feel like answers are complete and accept those.

I think it's a good thing that the forums are being closed, since I believe I've never found good answers there. (BTW where did you heard of this ?).

[OFF] Also, with Magento GO closing, I wonder what is the current direction of Magento at all.

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I am a newcomer at this site (the Magento one - participated few times).

As I noted, I got more answers if I posted the same problem in StackOverflow than in MageOverflow.

What I think is that users being able to do quality questions and answers rarely participate in this site, compared with participations about Magento in StackOverflow.

What's up to you is what they told you in former answers: downvote, cast close votes, etc.

But there's something that is not up to you: how this sub-site becomes public. My suggestion is that Magento-related questions in StackOverflow become forbidden there OR are they moved (after prompting the user about) to a Magento site, only if the user belongs to the Magento site.

Honestly, Magento is not a good software with a good support. Is poor, and it is hard to find good documentation and good community. Even worse is when the community is hashed away among personal sites, a closed official forum which does not show signs to reopen, and a non-official, powered by SE, website which becomes shadowed by another, powered by SE, site which is intended to programmers and non-technical people does not know how to participate in.

So the true responsibility here lies on SE's shoulders to be able to direct participants to the intended site..

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  • Interesting point that I 100% agree with. I think either way, though, that the point lies moot when the quality of questions coming in are so poor and lack any effort at all. When I see questions like "I need menu slide please solution me" I don't see anything of redeeming value.
    – pspahn
    Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 11:20

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