Automatically asking for specific information based on tags chosen

Question

I'm suggesting this feature now because I've just seen this WiFi connection problem thread posted, giving no hardware information... But there are dozens of similar threads where hardware information is required and not given.

I suggest that if you use a hardware-related tag like wireless, the question form expands to ask extra detail. In this case simple commands like: What is the output of lsusb, lspci and sudo lshw -c network?

Give them a plain textarea for each one, each optional (because not all threads need this information, in fairness). When posted, this information is turned into a code-block and stuck, with some headers to the bottom of the main text.

Provided the question was tagged properly in the first place and the questions those tags use were good, this extra detail would go a long way to streamline the whole process.

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In terms of implementation, this is something we can ask StackOverflow Inc for... Or we could just do it ourselves. I see no reason why this can't be done by pure JS (which we have some control over IIRC), pulling in the questions from a JSON file on another server (also under our control).

I would even go as far as to say this would be easy to accomplish.

I've got some spare time later on today so I could push out a GreaseMonkey demo that could very easily be turned into a chunk of JS we upload to the theme... If this sounds like a good idea. I won't if it's deemed undesirable.

Answer 1

I think it is a nice idea, but if you give a plain text area for each tag, it will be not that easy to use and kind of confusing. However,I still like it.

Moreover, it will better if at least one of the text areas is required and not all of them are optional. Beside, some of the tags will not have any text area such as Ubuntu 10.10 or 32-bit.