Re: Finding posts with zero replies.

[sfink]

I haven't looked, but I wouldn't surprised if you ended up drowning in stupid questions, suspiciously homework-ish queries, extremely domain-specific questions, and other such jetsam. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

In my experience, when I've asked a really nasty question that nobody had an answer for, it tends to be upvoted pretty heavily. Which is nice, since it's sort of a consolation prize: "well, I didn't get an answer, but at least I came away with a few dozen more XP!" That might make for search with a higher signal/noise ratio -- "find me SOPW posts with zero replies and somewhat high reputation". Judging from personal experience, it should be valid: if I read a question and think "wow, I have no clue, but I'd love to hear the answer", I often upvote it.

Your request also brings to mind a possible modification to the site to encourage monks to answer old but worthwhile questions. Part of the problem is that you could trawl through old questions and answer what you could, but you would never get that great meaningless-yet-satisfying XP boost you would from answering a recent question. It's because the recent questions get a lot more visitors, while nobody but the poster will ever see your reply to an older question.

So what if we allow the original poster to say whether a question has been properly answered yet or not? Hardly anyone would bother filling it out most of the time, of course -- it's one extra little thing to do that everyone would forget. And why not? The OP has the answer s/he was looking for already. But what if marking an old question -- say, at least a week stale -- as answered automatically popped it back into the list of current items (with a note explaining why it is mixed in with all the recent stuff)? Then people who cared about the same question could click on it and get their answer, so they're happy, and the answerer would get the upvotes, so s/he's happy. So while I would guess that few would bother to mark their recent questions as answered, people would have incentive to mark their old unanswered questions as answered, and hence people would have incentive to trawl through the archives, looking for those older but more difficult queries.

What do y'all think?

[TheEnigma]

I think sfink may be on to something. His idea could kill two birds with one stone (in theory). One is the idea of having an easy way to find un-replied-to questions, which is the subject of at least two threads lately. The other idea is being able to know if a question someone else asked has been answered; useful if you want to know the answer, too. Now, I know I could do this already by checking the new nodes every day (which I do), but having it automatic would be cool.

Of course just because something's cool doesn't mean it's worth the work to implement. I don't know how hard these ideas would be to implement.

I haven't tried Limbic~Region's code yet, he says it generates a list of all root SoPW nodes with no replies. If it works, that might satisfy the first idea OK.

Now I'm just thinking as I'm typing here, and I'm wondering: Can the average monk write some code to satisfy the second idea? L~R wrote the code above, and I've run across a bunch of things monks have apparently done on their own to get just the right data they want (stats and such).

So, is it possible for the average monk to write code that interacts with the site's data? If so, what kinds of things are possible? How hard is it? (I know, it depends on my skills ;)

Anyway, maybe the answer for both these ideas is "non-official" code that a monk could provide a link to.

TheEnigma