SoloLearn’s Question Meta and The Problem.

Question

So to clarify before I even begin, I am 100% supportive of people asking questions. I also think people should ask for help and feel no shame in doing so, even if you are experienced.
However, I’ve been trying to contribute and help beginners a lot and I see a particular pattern. This pattern makes it incredibly hard to answer questions. What is this pattern? Horrible questioning. I see too many “Please help me I am stuck” titles, with descriptions such as “My program isn’t working how should I fix it”. These are horribly vague and difficult to answer, and furthermore this is the typical question format until somebody asks for more info. For this, I think SoloLearn should work on a simple “Good Question Checklist”. It will notify people before they post a question to check. It will encourage good questions that have descriptive titles and even more descriptive descriptions. Before somebody mentions the community made ones, these are not official. They should at least be put somewhere they can be easily viewed. Opinions?

Answer 1

I agree with that. Many people also put useless questions and spam in the Q&A section.
There is actually something similar to a "Good Question Checklist" in the Sololearn Blog: https://www.sololearn.com/Blog/38/8-simple-rules-to-get-help-from-the-community/

Answer 2

Sandra Meyer Indeed...
And yet, so many struggle to put together enough of a well formed thought to construct a coherent question or provide answers that weren't merely an echo of the same basic responses already being blasted everywhere.
So... yeah... a good communications course would serve well for the general would-be programmers and aspiring hackers of the world. 😜🤘

Answer 3

Many apps or sites have a scheme where people - by being active in the place - first have to earn their right to use specific features.
So they are forced to get accustomed by themselves (which is frequently not that hard, if you try) and are then rewarded with more 'responsibilities'.
At times, such a scheme can be rather harsh. I've seen a chess place where you had to play a few dozen games before you earned the right to chat.
We have no such filter here, weak or strong, not at all. So naturally, everybody who comes here first, just posts, whatever comes to mind, often at random.
And since there's so much of offtopic, spam, duplicates, homework posts etc. going around already, there's hardly any incentive for other users to act differently.

Answer 4

The opinions I’ve viewed so far are interesting and in my opinion correct.
CeePlusPlus Unfortunately, that blog is in the sea of other blogs and isn’t as accessible. What I think would be a good idea is to recommend it when creating a question, though, along with other webpages made be the community, to further push SoloLearn’s “community based” initiative.
And yes, the reason I asked this was because others and I want to help people, but it is really hard with the questions being asked and straight up useless questions that serve nobody, including the questioner.

Answer 5

FAQ could introduce a little better and I would love to have a code formatting within posts! And I would love to sort out those questions from my list view, it's e.g. very hard to filter for unanswered questions.
Min number of characters in description would be nice too, there are so many posts without any content, some post their complete message into the title - so this should obviously be shortened...

Answer 6

Does anybody know how to request a feature for SoloLearn? I’m going to ask about what people have said here, and what I have said.

Answer 7

Sometimes the small things can help, user guidance: Minimum keywords required, additional step to add new keywords which are not listed as senseful keywords. Better hints in default values as just title and description. *Code detector* asking if better to add a project instead of posting code directly. And it would be really nice, if there was a global search in Q&A AND tutorials / lessons and so on...

Answer 8

HonFu That idea is quite interesting.

Answer 9

You can write to [email protected].

Answer 10

Sandra Meyer That is more of a reason to provide information on how to use SoloLearn in general as opposed to just questions. Perhaps a worthy idea would be to create a very small course the user is forced to do before they can do any other activities.

Answer 11

Possibly sololearn should remove the 5 likes-goals for badges completely to avoid or at least reduce spam. Or replace them by once 50 likes and next badge for once 100 likes and so on, just start so high, that it's too difficult to reach by spamming (btw. a single post with 50 likes would be much less annoying then 50 times of completely bulls*bingo for 5 likes).

Answer 12

HonFu Thanks!

Answer 13

Sandra Meyer What if I told you I made this post just to get those badges! (Joking, but seriously, I agree 100%. There is so much spam and bad questions, hopefully I receive a response).

Answer 14

A communication skills course 💭 btw. social / communication skills _are_ important developer skills!

Answer 15

Pro recommendations *what's next* after each course / lesson! To avoid "I've finished HTML and CSS, what's next?"!

Answer 16

How can I delete my account - this is a frequently occurring question for good reasons - many deletions are done before the user has some experience with the app. And it's quite outdated not to provide an account-deletion feature.