Questions typically go unanswered because they have a poor title or an incomprehensible or overly long description. With 50% of SOPW on the front page it is no longer useful to highlight a worthy node. It did used to be useful for this. Now it is not.

What would be useful would be a variation on dermephqs threaded newest nodes. Personally I don't like this in the form it is in beacuse you have pages and pages of data but it illustrates the fact that gathering replies, and therefore having in SOPW a format like this is quite possible:

Some good title ( 3/7 replies )
Some bad title ( 1/1 replies )
HELP, URGENT!!!! ( -1/0 replies ;-)
....
Some missed worthy node ( 0/0 replies )
[download]

where you perhaps count primary replies / and all replies. Another interesting and possibly useful option would be the ability to sort by replies ASC or DESC as well as select a recency timeframe to display.

Questions typically go unanswered because they have a poor title or an incomprehensible or overly long description.

Or the question was posted over the weekend, when fewer people visit the site.

Or the question is difficult and no one has a good answer.

There are many reasons. Frontpaging helps keep the nodes alive, but I agree with you that the system needs to be fixed. There should be some way of viewing nodes with fewer replies or identifying nodes you would like to see other people answer. I think threading NN helps, but will that feature remain in the sandpit forever?

There is a way of finding which nodes have been answered less. Go to Seekers of Perl Wisdom and look where it says the number of replies.

Sure, it could be more convenient. But we also get few enough questions that it isn't hard to do this manually. If you do not know the answer to a problem that you want answered, you can sometimes get an answer by just posting about it in chatter. If a few knowledgeable monks do that regularly then virtually everyone will get a reply. (Not that that seems to be a problem. In the last 100 approved questions, all have answers.)

Of course there are many reasons why nodes go unanswered. I actually thing Sunday night is optimal for really hard questions as there will be very few questions in SOPW on Monday am when people get to work (not). I would at least like to see X/Y replies where X is replies in the Front Page sense (ie direct) and Y is total replies to the node. I find the threaded NN just too long. Ideally you want to do threading with Javascript so you can collapse and expand the branches without a round trip. I don't expect that idea to float any time soon though.

cheers

tachyon

What would be useful would be a variation on dermephqs threaded newest nodes. Personally I don't like this in the form it is in beacuse you have pages and pages of data but it illustrates the fact that gathering replies,

The sandpit has been changing quite steadily recently. Did you write this before I rolled out the "root-and-node" mode and added the child/descendent counts? If yes then are things better now, and if not then what would have to change?



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demerphq


First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
-- Gandhi

Flux8

As you surmise I based my comments on what I looked at a few days ago. I thing the "root and node" mode with child/descendent counts is ..... exactly what I had in mind. It would be a worthy replacement to "N replies" on the Front Page.

The threading is good and bad. Sure it shows you the activity at a glance but....it takes up so much screen real estate. There is also a data transfer increase of course. Ideally the tree would be best implemented with DHTML. An all or nothing server refresh toggle would be a practical compromise.

cheers

tachyon