A strict mandate would not be effective and would possibly be harmful for the reasons pointed out by @ByteCommander in [this comment.](https://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/17093/can-we-require-that-questions-contain-a-question-mark-to-nudge-users-to-ask-expl?noredirect=1#comment35122_17093) My gut reaction is that I could certainly get behind the idea of automating notifying users with a short explanation, with a link to “How do I ask a good question?” as I've lost count of how many times I've encouraged a user to do just that, however in order to make that determination I'd have to actually **read** the question and at least make an attempt to understand it. This is a task that's exceedingly hard to do programmatically as humans are still better as sifting through this stuff than code is. There are a number of related questions on how to handle these non-questions on meta.stackexchange.com and after sifting through them I think the most related example is https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18857/should-non-questions-be-rewritten-as-questions I understand that it's more fun to answer questions than to play janitor and attempt to improve posts like you describe, but it's a necessary task. In situations such as you mention here, what I try to do is at least point them toward https://askubuntu.com/help/how-to-ask and if I think I get the gist of it, take my best shot at converting it to a question and drop a comment suggesting that the OP revise it if I've misinterpreted them.