reopen classic ask posts?

March 27, 2012 6:16 AM

How about Ask classic, reopening a question or two a day to updated answers?

This suggestion is more about improving the 'business' side of metafilter, I suppose, but it helps the user end too. There are some ask questions that are the goto for google, while others languish out-of-date. Maybe reopen a classic question a day to elicit more up to date answers?

posted by bystander to Feature Requests at 6:16 AM (35 comments total)

Who would pick such a question, and by what criteria?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:18 AM on March 27, 2012

Who would pick such a question, and by what criteria?
A mod, and perhaps a combination of high google hits vs age vs personal opinion? So a question about best tire chains from 2003 that continues to get high hits might be a candidate (assuming tire chains have moved on in terms of brands/quality etc.)
posted by bystander at 6:23 AM on March 27, 2012

There really isn't anything preventing someone from asking a similar question, with the same disclaimers as you've posted here ("I've seen old question A and old question B but would like more updated information if possible," etc.) as far as I know.
posted by elizardbits at 6:24 AM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

There's also the issue of where we'd see the reopened question. Is it just opened and sits where it is chronologically? Is it somehow pulled to the top? If it is pulled to the top, does it act like a new question there or does it become stuck at the top for a certain period of time?
posted by theichibun at 6:27 AM on March 27, 2012

Yeah, I'm having a sort of difficult time imagining the sort of post that this would be especially helpful for, since as elizardbits says, for the most part, Ask Metafilter usually does a good job of churning up new info when someone has a question similar to something that was asked previously, but they feel like there will be new answers due to developing technology, resources, products, etc., so they ask again... And the answers to extremely specific things ("what is the title of this book I'm trying to remember") remain unique or very limited.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:30 AM on March 27, 2012

I probably have some old questions I would hate to see reopened. We probably all do. Interesting idea, but I'm not in favor.
posted by The Deej at 6:30 AM on March 27, 2012

Yeah the mechanism for this would be tricky if not impossible. We definitely see people saying "This was asked three years ago but maybe there are more different answers now..." sorts of things and those are AOK. As much as I like the idea of people being able to add answers to older posts in some ways, the many issues that would come up [what if people just show up to challenge other posters who may or may not even be on the site anymore? What if the OP isn't on the site anymore?] I think this may be one of those neat ideas that's super impractical in reality.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:33 AM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

I came here to say something. jessamyn beat me to it. That is all.
posted by RolandOfEld at 6:44 AM on March 27, 2012

Who would pick such a question, and by what criteria?

The Council of Enlightened Users would be perfect for this.

The chairperson would lord over oversee a board of seven members, including themselves. Said chair would serve a one year term and have the official title, Knowitall. The six other board members would serve staggered six month terms with a two seats changing every three months. Those two seats would get members by a system based on the Hunger Games. Since two seats would be chosen at once, this encourages cooperation among future board members while all their enemies are slain at the end of the selection, so friction is kept to a minimum.

The Chairperson is chosen from the small selection of Mefites who can remain sober for a month.

We are currently accepting nominations for the first board, who's in?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:33 AM on March 27, 2012 [3 favorites]

This would be more for optimizing the Google magic than directly helping users, but I'd be down to help.
posted by Blasdelb at 7:46 AM on March 27, 2012

I'm only volunteering if I get a hat and a pony.
posted by arcticseal at 8:03 AM on March 27, 2012

Isn't this what the search function is for?
posted by pearlybob at 8:08 AM on March 27, 2012

Recycled questions could be nominated by the original poster. IE: people could bump old questions with a one year time out.
posted by Mitheral at 8:19 AM on March 27, 2012

I've often wished that posters would/could come update questions to let us know how helpful the answers were. We're missing that retrospective look.

"This was great, it made my cat one hundred percent more furry!"
"The advice here turned out to be bad, and the flames have spread to the neighboring county."

That kind of thing. Then helpful posters can feel good, unhelpful ones can feel silly, and the peanut gallery from Google will know whether or not the "go-to advice" is actually worth going to.
posted by Stagger Lee at 8:20 AM on March 27, 2012 [3 favorites]

Much more trouble than it's worth, I would have thought.
posted by Decani at 8:21 AM on March 27, 2012

Askme's are open for a year, very few of the questions won't have a resolution in that time.
posted by Mitheral at 8:34 AM on March 27, 2012

Mitheral: "Askme's are open for a year, very few of the questions won't have a resolution in that time."

OK. Why not just leave those open, then?
posted by zarq at 8:41 AM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

I mean, they're still listed as "have no answers yet" but are closed, so they will never be answered.
posted by zarq at 8:41 AM on March 27, 2012

The reason the threads close is so they don't become honeypots for spammers. We have a tool called "straggling comments" that checks for situations where a new comment to a thread was more than 30 days past the last one. Sometimes it's an update from the OP which is neat, but sometimes it's a snakey spammer trying to get their SEO in there. We figure if people have unanswered and closed questions it's totally okay for them to just ask again, particularly if they explain the vexing nature of the issue [i.e. asked before and unanswered] so people can see the question for the challenge that it is.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:02 AM on March 27, 2012

Spammers are why we can't have nice things.
posted by rtha at 9:06 AM on March 27, 2012

Let people use up a weekly question to instead reopen an old question. The Reopen screen would have a field for the reopener to explain why they reopened it ("I have the same question, but I'm wondering whether things have changed in the last three years."). It would appear as the first comment after a line separating the original answers from the reopening comment. Also add a "Reopened by username on date" line at the top with "Reopened" being a link to the place where the new comments start.

If you're the original asker, this is where you would update everyone: "As you recommended, I dumped the motherfucker already. Bad idea. I want him back but he has married someone else and he appears to have changed in all the ways you said he never would. Thanks a lot, askme."
posted by pracowity at 9:25 AM on March 27, 2012

the purpose of AskMetafilter is to answer the questions of the user who poses them. We're not an encyclopedia.
posted by Ironmouth at 9:29 AM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

Maybe reopen a classic question a day to elicit more up to date answers?

If you want to see more up-to-date answers to an old question, ask a more up-to-date version of the question.
posted by John Cohen at 9:37 AM on March 27, 2012

On a practical note, when I am Googling for up to date info on a topic where up-to-dateness is likely to be important, I tend to disregard things that were originally posted some years ago. Quite often I use the Google filters to narrow down the date range so I don't even see them.

So on the whole, chances are that adding new info to an old answer would not help me much when I'm looking for up to date info.

What does sometimes help is when old posts that rank high in Google have something at the top that says "This is now out of date, go here for the latest info".

There might be some automated way for Mefi to help with this. Maybe something like the Related Questions section, but more prominent and highlighting more recent versions of similar questions.
posted by philipy at 9:45 AM on March 27, 2012

I've often thought that it would be nice to have a formalized way to add references to older questions or posts. I know we can just add free-form links, (Previously, Previouslier) and that we have the auto-generated "Related Questions" (in Ask), and that we have tags. I continue to think that a formal way of noting relateds or follow-ups would be a useful addition to both Ask and the front page.

One advantage this could have over the current one way new->old linkage is that the original post could then be able to form a citation chain to newer, linked posts ("This post has been referred to by questions A, B, C").

This mechanism could solve the problem neatly: don't open an old post, just use the referral/citation method in a new post. The old post/question gets a link to the new one in a controllable way, and we can have easy to follow chains of follow-ups, updates and related posts or questions. It's a way of regularizing doubles on the front page too (eg linked before, but significant update).
posted by bonehead at 10:23 AM on March 27, 2012

I probably have some old questions I would hate to see reopened. We probably all do.

One of my first questions on AskMe last year was about (what I thought of as) someone else's bad behavior. I am desperate for it to close, thus removing the temptation for me to update it with Further Evidence.
posted by Snarl Furillo at 11:30 AM on March 27, 2012

It's something that I like the idea as a data/network nerd, bonehead. I think there'd be a lot of questions to answer before it was a clear Thing To Do, though: who would be responsible for discovery; what would the criteria for relatedness/followup be; is it moderated activity or a trusted group of power users or tag-your-own or open to everybody; what's the interface for operating it; how do we display this new info to incorporate it into existing thread views; how does it overlap with or distinguish itself from the auto-generated Related Questions stuff; what if the asker of one or the other objects to the linking; and so on.

At the core of it, the question for me is, does this improve how things work for folks in a way that's significant enough to justify the implementation and maintenance and user-education work invovled? If so, in what way? Working out a really solid answer to that is sort of my step one.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:07 PM on March 27, 2012

We have a couple of existing models for this: new posts/questions, and the ability to post-edit tags.

My original conception was that the poster alone do the discovery of citations and then only at the the time of posting. The interface would be a new set of (optional) fields on the new post/question page. As to where reference links would appear, I'd suggest under the [more inside] text as single links (post title) per line.

This would be the lowest worthwhile effort, IMO. It would be least confusing for third parties, who experience only seeing the new citation links. It would increase the moderation load, but I couldn't guess how much. Objection to linking might have to become a new flag.

It might be interesting to add post-posting editing and perhaps expand that to mutual contacts, like the tag cloud. I hadn't considered that. Do you think that would be worth the trouble? It seems like a lot of work. Is much mod time spent fixing bad tags? Can you flag a tag?
posted by bonehead at 12:46 PM on March 27, 2012

We don't spend much time dealing with tags, thankfully. There's no process for reporting issues there, folks just need to drop us a quick note at the contact form if there's a shitty tag situation. I'd guess that tricky disagreeable previouslying wouldn't be a big issue, just one of a pile of things to consider for any notional system.

The fact that we've had back-tagging work well makes me feel okay about ideas like this in general, so my thinking about this is mostly more in the "what is the compelling net improvement" thing rather than a lot of worries about abuse. Basically the case for what's significant enough an improvement to how the site works that what's involved in creating and maintaining and displaying a new system is worth it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:10 PM on March 27, 2012

Oh my yes would somebody please answer this classic AskMe question?
posted by headnsouth at 1:53 PM on March 27, 2012

I wouldn't do this unless the original poster were involved; they should be able to opt out of now-irrelevant questions, for example, & mention solutions not covered in the thread.
posted by Pronoiac at 2:47 PM on March 27, 2012

jessamyn: "The reason the threads close is so they don't become honeypots for spammers. We have a tool called "straggling comments" that checks for situations where a new comment to a thread was more than 30 days past the last one. Sometimes it's an update from the OP which is neat, but sometimes it's a snakey spammer trying to get their SEO in there. We figure if people have unanswered and closed questions it's totally okay for them to just ask again, particularly if they explain the vexing nature of the issue [i.e. asked before and unanswered] so people can see the question for the challenge that it is."

Okay. That sucks.

So why does the list of questions that don't have answers yet (being the operative word there) include closed threads? In case someone wants to take a stab at posting them again?
posted by zarq at 3:18 PM on March 27, 2012

I don't know if we specifically considered that aspect with the unanswered tab or just ended up not checking for closedness in that query. I suppose we could hide them, but we could also just keep them there for completeness' sake. Maybe someone would mefimail the asker if they came up with the answer years later.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:44 PM on March 27, 2012

I'd think it would tend to favor the more chatfiltery questions, "name your favorite book!" kind of thing, which I'm fine with in & of themselves but don't want to see the place overrun with. Maybe if you could put together a list of likely candidates we could use them as a sample to judge the idea with.
posted by scalefree at 4:40 PM on March 27, 2012

I sparrows is still wondering, you still can't get truly vegetarian chondroitin, unfortunately.
posted by misha at 2:38 PM on March 28, 2012