I found myself (unintentionally and not proudly) asking a question on Security Stack Exchange and as I got simple answers and became more educated about what I was asking, my question changed. A lot.
While what I was asking was staying the same, the question itself seemed to have changed a lot. There also seemed to be a lot of extra information that flew around and convoluted the whole Q&A system. I think the 2 over-all sources of the chaos were that I didn't do enough research before-hand (though I didn't know that at the time of asking the question), and while I had a general idea of what I wanted to ask, I didn't know exactly what I was asking at the beginning.
My big questions are:
- Is this kind of scenario always my fault for unintentionally asking too broad of a question?
- How can I (or any user for that matter) avoid this kind of scenario?
- How do I know when to stop adding information to my question and ask a new one?
- If I find myself ending up with a whole new question, should I ask my new question as, well, a new question and flag my old question for deletion so that all of the out-dated discussion and possibly off-topic answers go away?