Cleaning up the mess

Question

This is the 3rd year of GATE Overflow. In the first year only few people were here. But results were awesome as 5+ people got to top 100 and majority were first time takers and from final year.

Last year majority of toppers here were repeaters. Rather many final year students stayed away from here as they might have got frightened by the answering of others.

This time also I suppose more or less of last year is happening. But more than that many people are adding lots of irrelevant and rather STUPID questions here. So, my question is how to clean them? I cannot let them continue this as this is not only affecting those who are asking these but also the innocent new visitors to the site. I have made a new listing:

https://gateoverflow.in/questions?sort=featured

which shows featured questions and even from any subject. I'll add more questions there and this will be like "absolute needed" for GATE. But this won't help the other mess. The options are

1. Close all irrelevant or bad questions
2. Correct them
3. Add a "bad-question" tag

Also will add a "Mark as Wrong" option for Answers. We cannot hide/delete wrong answers as they might follow good discussion as comments.

Comments

CLEAN GATEOVERFLOW | CLEAN INDIA  : )

sir, I liked featured question option.

Suggestions-  

1. The 2nd option given by you is correct but it requires an expert to correct those incorrect questions.

2. Irrelevant or bad questions can be identified by the count of downvotes and later can be deleted.

3. Bad question tag can be useful if the implementation of this tag is not a big deal.

4. Approval option like facebook gatecse group.

5. Regular notification to the user who gets regular downvotes.

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Yes. 2 is kind of impossible at the moment. Though sometimes for some questions can be done.

Downvotes won't work for most of the cases. Say if someone posts "i = i++" he/she will be getting upvotes :P

Bad tag - adding tag requires an Edit- not very easy thing to do. But can be solved by adding a "Bad" button which would automatically add the bad tag.

4. is already there. Just turned off. I do not want anyone to be waiting for their questions. In FB there is no other option.

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What I want is everyone who is spending time here to really benefit from it. For this discussion should happen more for good questions and less for bad ones. For quite sometime I'm seeing just the opposite. Some good people are concentrating on good ones, but many are not. Anyway I'm quite happy with many people who became quite good in Decidability now. Last year, only very few people were there who got it.

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Approval doesn't seem good.

An another option can be adder like [on hold] in stackoverflow. Mark as wrong is Good option.

Also banning user for some days if his many question's are put on hold, or if he recieves a certain number of downvotes within a duration.

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I'll add "Mark as bad" for question and "Mark as wrong" for answers soon. Featured Questions list is there- does it make sense to get a "Difficult Questions" list?

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Featured question list is good. But I think there is no need for another tag.

But instead it would be better that a user can place some reward on some question say 100 points to his asked or any other question in GO. Similarly many user's can do that so say 3 users find a question important or difficult then total reward for that question would be 300. Now, It will make sure that more persons answer question due to points. After question is answered, the points can be given by user to any answer(not best answer). But once one raised some points, they necessarily are to be given to an answer or to none. but points cannot be taken back.

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yes sir, "mark as bad" and "wrong ans" button would be fine.

Featured Questions list is there - does it make sense to get a "Difficult Questions" list?

If featured questions lists contain important and difficult questions then no need of another difficult question list.

And one more thing sir- What about TO-DO list. ? Some days ago, I asked you for the same.

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Sir, Please also a feature of Subject/Topic experts (i guess 5 is good). (like most viewed writer in Quora)

It could be on the basis of upvotes or on the basis of best answers or total points, so that we can ask questions from them. duration could be past 1 month.

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@coolcoder points given from ones own points? This is called a bounty. It is there in many QA sites.

@vijay Yes, I meant to include difficult ones separately. But you are right, they can be combined and identified using "difficult" tag. Todo list- its a bit confusing. You want already seen questions to be removed from Question lists?

Subject expert- yes, I have been trying to do this. But is not easy due to the current point structure which does not store where the point comes from. But this can be done, let me see.

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@Arjun Sir 

One small request for you apart from these ,Please add TURN ON NOTIFICATION which is like there in Facebook if possible. Many times i feel i want to know all the discussions happening in a particular question and i feel many are like me but there is no way to get notification other than commenting in it.Adding the question to favorites and searching each and every discussion is kind of difficult.This would be a great help!

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@Arjun sir

One more thing that i think of is having some labels in each question like seen, need review and imp. which are private to a user. means local to user. So that each user can organize questions based on his comfort.

And Yes, turn off notifications must also be there.

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Sir,

I don't want any questions to be removed, let everything things be as it is, just want a flag just like favourite which is already there. We get to know our favourite questions without opening it just by seeing star mark. I want similar flag for unseen, seen but not done yet, and done with a particular question. If we can distinguish all three things without opening a question then it would be time saving for users.

Thank you sir:)

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Abcd You mean when they open a question they need to know if it has been seen earlier etc?

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yes, but this is not easy to implement I feel. It is easy to maintain a small list. For large list, need to try. Let me see..

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Arjun sir. Adding "bad question" tag is better for 2 reasons:

1. You can delete such questions so that valuable server space will be saved.( even duplicate questions should be removed)

2. You need not look into cleaning the mess frequently. We can just have reviewers who really can assess the question type. And once approved by reviewers, such questions can be deleted automatically, periodically.

Answer 1

Previous GATE Tab enabled in Question Pages which shows only previous GATE questions - can be browsed subjectwise.

Questions can now be marked bad - will be shown with a cross meaning it is badly made and one should not waste time on it. Ambiguous questions are not considered bad.

Answers can now be marked wrong - will be shown by a single line over it.

Users can now mark a question as read to quickly skip over it in the question lists.

"Turn Notification On for this Question" is coming.

Turning On Notifications - "Follow Button" is now added. Unfollow is also there, but this does not stop notification from the comments, answers beneath your post.

Comments

OK so that’s a bug. 

If I do tag search then it’s not marked as read but if we access it from directory then it’s marked as read.

Thanks sir for quick response and immediate support.

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You’re welcome. Should now work on the search pages too.

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Yes sir. Thanks a lot. That saved my day