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More than infrequently, opening posts on SO are not questions at all, in the very grammatical sense: They're just statements or vague musings (for instance this recent one), and it's not clear what exactly is being asked (since nothing is technically being asked).

I always feel that it shouldn't be our job to construct a question from someone's undirected ramblings, and so this is usually a NARQ candidate for me.

I was wondering if we could add a very simple check that would count the number of literal question marks in a post and refuse to accept it if there are none. This could be accompanied by a small note on what a question should look like.

What do you think? Should we add this feature?

Update: Since people seem to get hung up on the details, I'd like to clarify that an entirely satisfactory alternative would be to pop up an overridable notice with a warning, like "Hello, you appear to be writing a question. Would you like help?", with a "No thanks" button to dismiss it and submit the post regardless.

Update 2: If you disagree that absence of a question mark is a strong signal that the question is poor, could you please provide examples of good, useful and appropriate questions that do not contain question marks? I've provided several additional examples of when the signal works in the comments, and more come up regularly, so I would appreciate to see some evidence of the contrary.

More than infrequently, opening posts on SO are not questions at all, in the very grammatical sense: They're just statements or vague musings (for instance this recent one), and it's not clear what exactly is being asked (since nothing is technically being asked).

I always feel that it shouldn't be our job to construct a question from someone's undirected ramblings, and so this is usually a NARQ candidate for me.

I was wondering if we could add a very simple check that would count the number of literal question marks in a post and refuse to accept it if there are none. This could be accompanied by a small note on what a question should look like.

What do you think? Should we add this feature?

Update: Since people seem to get hung up on the details, I'd like to clarify that an entirely satisfactory alternative would be to pop up an overridable notice with a warning, like "Hello, you appear to be writing a question. Would you like help?", with a "No thanks" button to dismiss it and submit the post regardless.

Update 2: If you disagree that absence of a question mark is a strong signal that the question is poor, could you please provide examples of good, useful and appropriate questions that do not contain question marks? I've provided several additional examples of when the signal works in the comments, and more come up regularly, so I would appreciate to see some evidence of the contrary.

More than infrequently, opening posts on SO are not questions at all, in the very grammatical sense: They're just statements or vague musings (for instance this recent one), and it's not clear what exactly is being asked (since nothing is technically being asked).

I always feel that it shouldn't be our job to construct a question from someone's undirected ramblings, and so this is usually a NARQ candidate for me.

I was wondering if we could add a very simple check that would count the number of literal question marks in a post and refuse to accept it if there are none. This could be accompanied by a small note on what a question should look like.

What do you think? Should we add this feature?

Update: Since people seem to get hung up on the details, I'd like to clarify that an entirely satisfactory alternative would be to pop up an overridable notice with a warning, like "Hello, you appear to be writing a question. Would you like help?", with a "No thanks" button to dismiss it and submit the post regardless.

More than infrequently, opening posts on SO are not questions at all, in the very grammatical sense: They're just statements or vague musings (for instance this recent one), and it's not clear what exactly is being asked (since nothing is technically being asked).

I always feel that it shouldn't be our job to construct a question from someone's undirected ramblings, and so this is usually a NARQ candidate for me.

I was wondering if we could add a very simple check that would count the number of literal question marks in a post and refuse to accept it if there are none. This could be accompanied by a small note on what a question should look like.

What do you think? Should we add this feature?

Update: Since people seem to get hung up on the details, I'd like to clarify that an entirely satisfactory alternative would be to pop up an overridable notice with a warning, like "Hello, you appear to be writing a question. Would you like help?", with a "No thanks" button to dismiss it and submit the post regardless.

Update 2: If you disagree that absence of a question mark is a strong signal that the question is poor, could you please provide examples of good, useful and appropriate questions that do not contain question marks? I've provided several additional examples of when the signal works in the comments, and more come up regularly, so I would appreciate to see some evidence of the contrary.

More than infrequently, opening posts on SO are not questions at all, in the very grammatical sense: They're just statements or vague musings (for instance this recent one), and it's not clear what exactly is being asked (since nothing is technically being asked).

I always feel that it shouldn't be our job to construct a question from someone's undirected ramblings, and so this is usually a NARQ candidate for me.

I was wondering if we could add a very simple check that would count the number of literal question marks in a post and refuse to accept it if there are none. This could be accompanied by a small note on what a question should look like.

What do you think? Should we add this feature?

More than infrequently, opening posts on SO are not questions at all, in the very grammatical sense: They're just statements or vague musings (for instance this recent one), and it's not clear what exactly is being asked (since nothing is technically being asked).

I always feel that it shouldn't be our job to construct a question from someone's undirected ramblings, and so this is usually a NARQ candidate for me.

I was wondering if we could add a very simple check that would count the number of literal question marks in a post and refuse to accept it if there are none. This could be accompanied by a small note on what a question should look like.

What do you think? Should we add this feature?

Update: Since people seem to get hung up on the details, I'd like to clarify that an entirely satisfactory alternative would be to pop up an overridable notice with a warning, like "Hello, you appear to be writing a question. Would you like help?", with a "No thanks" button to dismiss it and submit the post regardless.