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I'm all for the restructuring of the 10k tools. That used to be a place that I found a lot of value before I was a moderator, but the things that I found of value there (a list of questions with 3+ close votes, access to Late Answers and First Posts, etc.) now have new homes in the review system.

Frankly, the "Not An Answer" list of flags is often being abused now as a means for people to farm helpful flags (which really got bad with the Winterbash hats and around moderator elections), and I don't get a lot of value out of the number of people flagging something as "Not An Answer". When you've seen good answers with 30+ "Not An Answer" flags on them, you take all of that with a grain of salt. One flag is enough.

However, I want to expand on Lance's answer, because I think he brings up a very good point. If we're examining how to improve the workflow behind handling non-answers, I think it helps to look at root causes behind these answers. Ignoring spam and gibberish, almost all non-answers are attempts to comment on something.

New users come here and want to add a little more information to a question or answer and find that they can't. They read the restriction that you need a certain amount of reputation to leave a comment and say "screw that, I'm not finding something to quickly answer just so I can leave a comment here". Many leave and don't come back, but some ignore our warnings and leave their comment as an answer. This is a frustrating experience for a new user who just wants to chip in a little more information, or perhaps correct a minor issue with a question or answer.

The point of the reputation bar that a user has to clear is to prevent comment spam, which would be a very real problem if everyone could comment. However, I believe that if we had better tools to moderate comments in the same way we can questions and answers, it would be possible to watch over and deal with problematic comments from new users.

I've run this past other moderators, but I believe an equivalent for the First Posts and Late Answers review queues could be applied to comments as well. For moderators (and potentially 10k+ users) we could expose a list of recent comments, and make comments searchable to look for patterns of spam. We could add a new category of comment flags for spam and offensive content, weighted in the moderator tools like current spam flags.

With those tools, and with some of the limitations expressed by Tim in his comment on Lance's answer, I believe we could open up commenting to 1-rep registered users and significantly reduce the frequency of non-answers. Yes, you'll see more chatty comments come in ("me too, I'm having this problem", etc.), but the community will be able to flag those for removal just as we can non-answers.

Overall, I think that would make for a much less frustrating experience for newer users visiting the site, hopefully leading to some of them converting into more active members, and reduce the amount of work needed to keep the site clean. It also would give us the means to deal with spammers who somehow pass the current reputation threshold for leaving comments (which has happened, and we had no means of detecting or managing this).

I'm all for the restructuring of the 10k tools. That used to be a place that I found a lot of value before I was a moderator, but the things that I found of value there (a list of questions with 3+ close votes, access to Late Answers and First Posts, etc.) now have new homes in the review system.

Frankly, the "Not An Answer" list of flags is often being abused now as a means for people to farm helpful flags (which really got bad with the Winterbash hats and around moderator elections), and I don't get a lot of value out of the number of people flagging something as "Not An Answer". When you've seen good answers with 30+ "Not An Answer" flags on them, you take all of that with a grain of salt. One flag is enough.

However, I want to expand on Lance's answer, because I think he brings up a very good point. If we're examining how to improve the workflow behind handling non-answers, I think it helps to look at root causes behind these answers. Ignoring spam and gibberish, almost all non-answers are attempts to comment on something.

New users come here and want to add a little more information to a question or answer and find that they can't. They read the restriction that you need a certain amount of reputation to leave a comment and say "screw that, I'm not finding something to quickly answer just so I can leave a comment here". Many leave and don't come back, but some ignore our warnings and leave their comment as an answer. This is a frustrating experience for a new user who just wants to chip in a little more information, or perhaps correct a minor issue with a question or answer.

The point of the reputation bar that a user has to clear is to prevent comment spam, which would be a very real problem if everyone could comment. However, I believe that if we had better tools to moderate comments in the same way we can questions and answers, it would be possible to watch over and deal with problematic comments from new users.

I've run this past other moderators, but I believe an equivalent for the First Posts and Late Answers review queues could be applied to comments as well. For moderators (and potentially 10k+ users) we could expose a list of recent comments, and make comments searchable to look for patterns of spam. We could add a new category of comment flags for spam and offensive content, weighted in the moderator tools like current spam flags.

With those tools, and with some of the limitations expressed by Tim in his comment on Lance's answer, I believe we could open up commenting to 1-rep registered users and significantly reduce the frequency of non-answers. Yes, you'll see more chatty comments come in ("me too, I'm having this problem", etc.), but the community will be able to flag those for removal just as we can non-answers.

Overall, I think that would make for a much less frustrating experience for newer users visiting the site, hopefully leading to some of them converting into more active members, and reduce the amount of work needed to keep the site clean. It also would give us the means to deal with spammers who somehow pass the current reputation threshold for leaving comments (which has happened, and we had no means of detecting or managing this).

I'm all for the restructuring of the 10k tools. That used to be a place that I found a lot of value before I was a moderator, but the things that I found of value there (a list of questions with 3+ close votes, access to Late Answers and First Posts, etc.) now have new homes in the review system.

Frankly, the "Not An Answer" list of flags is often being abused now as a means for people to farm helpful flags (which really got bad with the Winterbash hats and around moderator elections), and I don't get a lot of value out of the number of people flagging something as "Not An Answer". When you've seen good answers with 30+ "Not An Answer" flags on them, you take all of that with a grain of salt. One flag is enough.

However, I want to expand on Lance's answer, because I think he brings up a very good point. If we're examining how to improve the workflow behind handling non-answers, I think it helps to look at root causes behind these answers. Ignoring spam and gibberish, almost all non-answers are attempts to comment on something.

New users come here and want to add a little more information to a question or answer and find that they can't. They read the restriction that you need a certain amount of reputation to leave a comment and say "screw that, I'm not finding something to quickly answer just so I can leave a comment here". Many leave and don't come back, but some ignore our warnings and leave their comment as an answer. This is a frustrating experience for a new user who just wants to chip in a little more information, or perhaps correct a minor issue with a question or answer.

The point of the reputation bar that a user has to clear is to prevent comment spam, which would be a very real problem if everyone could comment. However, I believe that if we had better tools to moderate comments in the same way we can questions and answers, it would be possible to watch over and deal with problematic comments from new users.

I've run this past other moderators, but I believe an equivalent for the First Posts and Late Answers review queues could be applied to comments as well. For moderators (and potentially 10k+ users) we could expose a list of recent comments, and make comments searchable to look for patterns of spam. We could add a new category of comment flags for spam and offensive content, weighted in the moderator tools like current spam flags.

With those tools, and with some of the limitations expressed by Tim in his comment on Lance's answer, I believe we could open up commenting to 1-rep registered users and significantly reduce the frequency of non-answers. Yes, you'll see more chatty comments come in ("me too, I'm having this problem", etc.), but the community will be able to flag those for removal just as we can non-answers.

Overall, I think that would make for a much less frustrating experience for newer users visiting the site, hopefully leading to some of them converting into more active members, and reduce the amount of work needed to keep the site clean. It also would give us the means to deal with spammers who somehow pass the current reputation threshold for leaving comments (which has happened, and we had no means of detecting or managing this).

I'm all for the restructuring of the 10k tools. That used to be a place that I found a lot of value before I was a moderator, but the things that I found of value there (a list of questions with 3+ close votes, access to Late Answers and First Posts, etc.) now have new homes in the review system.

Frankly, the "Not An Answer" list of flags is often being abused now as a means for people to farm helpful flags (which really got bad with the Winterbash hats and around moderator elections), and I don't get a lot of value out of the number of people flagging something as "Not An Answer". When you've seen good answers with 30+ "Not An Answer" flags on them, you take all of that with a grain of salt. One flag is enough.

However, I want to expand on Lance's answer, because I think he brings up a very good point. If we're examining how to improve the workflow behind handling non-answers, I think it helps to look at root causes behind these answers. Ignoring spam and gibberish, almost all non-answers are attempts to comment on something.

New users come here and want to add a little more information to a question or answer and find that they can't. They read the restriction that you need a certain amount of reputation to leave a comment and say "screw that, I'm not finding something to quickly answer just so I can leave a comment here". Many leave and don't come back, but some ignore our warnings and leave their comment as an answer. This is a frustrating experience for a new user who just wants to chip in a little more information, or perhaps correct a minor issue with a question or answer.

The point of the reputation bar that a user has to clear is to prevent comment spam, which would be a very real problem if everyone could comment. However, I believe that if we had better tools to moderate comments in the same way we can questions and answers, it would be possible to watch over and deal with problematic comments from new users.

I've run this past other moderators, but I believe an equivalent for the First Posts and Late Answers review queues could be applied to comments as well. For moderators (and potentially 10k+ users) we could expose a list of recent comments, and make comments searchable to look for patterns of spam. We could add a new category of comment flags for spam and offensive content, weighted in the moderator tools like current spam flags.

With those tools, and with some of the limitations expressed by Tim in his comment on Lance's answer, I believe we could open up commenting to 1-rep registered users and significantly reduce the frequency of non-answers. Yes, you'll see more chatty comments come in ("me too, I'm having this problem", etc.), but the community will be able to flag those for removal just as we can non-answers.

Overall, I think that would make for a much less frustrating experience for newer users visiting the site, hopefully leading to some of them converting into more active members, and reduce the amount of work needed to keep the site clean. It also would give us the means to deal with spammers who somehow pass the current reputation threshold for leaving comments (which has happened, and we had no means of detecting or managing this).