Recently, I’ve been seeing some infringing of some minor guidelines, or just making some choices that are bad for a forum’s quality in general. I am going to go over a few of these problems, and hopefully, they will occur less often.
Necroposting
I’ve been seeing a lot of this recently. Please do not necropost, topics that are usually older than 2 weeks without response would probably be considered inactive. Posting an answer to one of these topics would be considered necroposting because you are pointlessly reviving an old thread. If the user that was looking for answers in the first place hasn’t replied in a while, they probably didn’t get a working response within enough time or found a solution already, and probably aren’t looking for a solution anymore.
If you are facing a similar problem, just create a new topic as information from these posts may be outdated at the time of reply.
Pinging Unrelated Users
While it is nice to be able to get a moderator’s attention quickly, it is not of best practice to ping them every time you need something. Think about how much work they would have if they had to deal with every Ask user constantly pinging them to make their post a wiki!
Unfinished Templates
Templates are there to provide you with a foundation for creating a post. Skipping fields within the templates or deleting them entirely probably won’t provide users with enough information to solve your problem. Usually, all you need is a Repl link and a question you want to ask, but this can vary from post to post.
If you know how to structure your post with enough information for users to help without using the templates, go for it!
This was kind of short, but solving these three issues alone will help fellow users solve your recent problems faster, and put less workload on moderators.
Actually I would agree with bobastley on this one. In my experience, necroposting generally does more harm than good as users just jump in providing only half the needed information and they would’ve been better off to have made their own topic.
We’re doing the best we can. Replit staff only helps with Replit issues (such as bugs) and feedback, and not code help, so it’s up to community members to help with code. A lot of the more knowledgeable users left Ask because they had a falling-out with Replit. That leaves people like me who don’t know as much to answer all these questions. The active Ask community is much smaller than it used to be with just as many if not more posts to answer.
Also I’ve seen a few posts that ask for help, provide no context or helpful information, and then when someone asks for clarification OP never responds. That fails not for the lack of trying but because OP gave up.
Feel free to provide help in any capacity to reduce this problem.
I just remembered one more thing about necroposting: normal users leave Ask after they either get an answer or nobody responds. They don’t keep coming back. Ask has thousands and thousands of users and only a dozen or so are truly “active”.
OP will probably never see that and so it will never be marked as a solution because we only mark solutions when OP says we solved their problem. Even if they do in this case as a general rule users don’t come back. So posting there is kinda helpful for users finding that topic but it won’t make it solved.
Necroposting is problematic, since the user (original poster) may not even be active at this time, the problem may have already been solved or not looking for said problem
Necroposting is frowned upon although I’m not sure there’s ever been an official statement on that. I’ve brought this up internally.
I’ll try to state this as objectively as possible so as to not offend anyone: Ask had plenty of super-knowledgeable highly-devoted users and they had a huge falling-out with Replit which crippled this forum. Replit staff made some decisions in an attempt to fix things but it didn’t make the community feel any better. The community as a whole abandoned this forum leaving us with very few people to help. What Ask needs is more active users who are knowledgeable.
My point of view does not coincide with yours. You think that necroposting is normal when the problem has not been solved yet. I believe that if the topic remains inactive for several months, it is not worth writing in it, since this promotes the inactive topic up, and the creator of the topic has probably long forgotten about this topic.
I’m pretty sure that most of the valuable people that left were under 18. I know an 11-year-old with incredible knowledge of programming. Age isn’t particularly relevant when discussing programming skill or knowledge level.
Replit staff only helps with Replit issues (such as bugs) and feedback, and not code help, so it’s up to community members to help with code. A lot of the more knowledgeable users left Ask because they had a falling-out with Replit. That leaves people like me who don’t know as much to answer all these questions. The active Ask community is much smaller than it used to be with just as many if not more posts to answer.