What are Ask Ubuntu's current problems, if any, as of early 2012?

Question

The following question was posed to me on my moderator nomination

Is there any concrete issues you would like to focus on as a moderator?

My answer is what amounts to janitorial work, but I'd like to ask you, the community this question - what are the problems (outside of our formerly dropping answer rate and related sadness) that Ask Ubuntu is currently experiencing, if any?

Answer 1

For me, the worst part of AskUbuntu compared to StackOverflow is the influx of bad questions.

One example to hand (not necessarily the best example) is https://askubuntu.com/questions/97637/ubuntu-11-10-freezes-on-boot-just-installed.

What I think is bad about this question (at least at the moment I'm writing) is:

• The title sounds like something that might apply to anyone but there's no good reason to think another machine that freezes will be doing so for the same reason.
• There are answers (which should be, at most, comments) where other people report similar problems, probably from different causes
• The question is incomplete and it's likely to either stay that way or turn into a long comment thread to eventually work it out
• Questions like this are unlikely to get votes or acceptance

The result is that it does not produce a wiki of reusable answers in the way that StackOverflow aspires to do.

I wonder if AskUbuntu should actually send people who are having machine specific problems to either file a bug, or a Launchpad answer (though that ui is not great), or to some other site that is user-friendly but better suited to an ongoing user-specific question (getsatisfaction.com?)

I wonder, too, what we should do with these questions. Sometimes they are answered in a way that helps that individual user, but they are generally not adding value to the site. I am inclined to start downvoting them, but this seems unfair to the questioner, who doesn't know they're doing something bad.

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To summarize the comment discussion so far: we can improve AU by just pointing the user to bug filing advice and promptly closing the question.

Answer 2

I don't think the user growth by itself is a problem.

Up until October we weren't doing so bad, we had the right "ratio" of experienced users who could handle the traffic. Then we got mentioned in the installer and got a ton of traffic. Unfortunately for us we were overwhelmed in new questions and not enough people who could vote for duplicates, and we've been backlogged this entire cycle with abandoned questions.

Up until then we were growing in a more steady rate and it wasn't so bad. I think if we would have naturally gotten to this amount of traffic we would have enough mid-to-high reputation users where we could more easily handle the incoming questions.

• The people who bother to do cleanup are either limited by running out of close votes or overflagging. It's increasingly difficult to close questions. So we end up flagging.
• So now we have too many flags and not enough people to look after them, so now we need an election, which should help.
• Either way I don't think more moderators solves too many of the problems, we still need a core group of experienced users to handle closing questions. Moderators have "supervotes" which means they can close questions in one vote. When they do that it feels heavy handed and IMO it's no substitute for having the community manage it's own questions.

I think eventually at some point we'll reach equilibrium with the amount of people over 3k who can vote to close and over 10k people who are basically already moderators can manage this kind of incoming question load.

Poolie is right that we're getting swamped with questions that should be bug reports, a scan of the boot tag is a wasteland of dead bodies. I think part of the problem is that we're getting too soft on the amount of questions we allow here and we should be stricter on pushing people to the bug tracker or the forums for "soft" questions like this one.

(196 posts in crash, 196!!!)

Answer 3

I do not mean that Ask Ubuntu is doomed or anything. But there are things we can work with to make it a better site.

One problem is that Ask Ubuntu has a relatively high influx of new content. More content means more janitorial work. Thus, a relevant issue is: how can we get more people to do janitorial work?

Another, but related, problem is that some questions lack in describing the problem at hand such that they are hard to answer without lots of guesswork. So, a relevant issue is: how can we encourage people to write answerable and researched questions?

Answer 4

One answer is growth.

I wouldn't call it a problem thought on the contrary. The more people use Ask Ubuntu the better however growth has certain side effects.

Two of those side effects are an increasing influx of questions and the higher probability of lower quality content. What this means is that we will have to put more effort into keeping the quality level up to our standard (In other words we have to push our cloning research effort so we can clone Jorge a couple of times).

To answer the question directly I'd say other than being active and helping the community to reach their goal there is not much a moderator should do on his own.

Note: By helping the community I meant encouraging them to get involved and own their community. I'd also like to point out that this is something that jrg already successfully did.