Hi. I'm still very new to Askubuntu, and have a question about unanswered questions.
When one goes unanswered for a certain amount of time, what are our options to get the question noticed again?
5 Answers
The best way to attract a lot of attention to a question is setting a bounty. After 48 hours you're allowed to put up some of your own reputation as a reward for somebody who answers the question. Obviously this "costs" reputation but even if you can only spare a little, just getting it into the featured section will help it get noticed.
Also make sure your question is as good as it possibly can be. If it's about hardware, make sure it has all the relevant model numbers, kernel modules, etc (lspci and lsusb help here). If people can't understand your question, they're unlikely to be able to help you.
Other than that, advertising the question off-site is a good method to get help. You can ask people in IRC to help. If you have a twitter account or a blog, you can ask for help there too.
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Don't forget to mention the Community User - which will bring old unanswered questions to the top of the list every X amount of days.– Marco Ceppi ModCommented Apr 30, 2011 at 1:52
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Covered in the faq:
https://askubuntu.com/faq#bounty
What if I don’t get a good answer?
First, make sure you've asked a good question. In order to get good answers to your question, you may need to put additional effort into your question. Edit your question to provide status and progress updates. Document your own continued efforts to answer your question. This will naturally bump your question and get more people interested in it.
If, despite your best efforts, you feel questions aren’t getting good answers, you can help by offering a bounty. Slice off anywhere from +50 to +500 of your own hard-earned reputation and attach it to any question as a bounty. The bountied question will appear with a special indicator in all question lists, and it will also be visible on the home page Featured tab for the duration of the bounty period.
From a question on Meta StackOverflow:
You can "bump" your thread by providing status and progress updates resulting from your own continued efforts to answer the question yourself. I usually do that unless I really hit a dead end with no further clues to follow. Some times I eventually bring about enough understanding to realise the answer, and thus post a resolution to my own problem.
If you have at least 75 rep points, you can offer a bounty, promising to give some of your points to the person who correctly answers your question.
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1Hi John. Thanks! That helps a lot. I didn't know whether or not "bumping" was allowed, but so long as you update the answer with new information, I guess it would be just fine.– AlanCommented May 22, 2011 at 2:41
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Also, see my video on how to improve your questions!
answered Apr 30, 2011 at 1:28
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Jorge, these links do not work any more if you have moved the videos then update the links otherwise you should probably remove this answer. Commented Mar 29, 2014 at 15:01
If you have non-resolved hardware issues, my suggestion is to wait until fresh Ubuntu Beta releases, install it and file bugreports. You may do this even with Alpha (and have a better chance that your problem will be solved), but your experience may harm. For example, I followed Karmic release, but one day Pulseaudio was broken and I had to downgrade back to Jaunty.
