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Its know that certain times of the day are better for asking questions than others. Sometimes someone has a very strange question, or has another good reason to game the time the question gets asked. Since the result is good for the user (gets the best possible anwer for their question), and assumeable best for the community since it would lead to better content overall if more hard or obscure questions got answered.

Edit As an alternative, how about the ability to queue up a question have it entered into the system, but not have it appear on the site until a button is pushed later. This way someone has to be on the site when the question goes live, but they can write it up ahead of time.

So is such a feature desirable for stackoverflow?

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  • If you really really want this, lobby for a Stack Overflow API and then you can write your own code to do it!
    – Greg Hewgill
    Commented Jul 31, 2009 at 1:09

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Currently questions that pop up to the top of main page fall to the bottom in 35 to 5 minutes depending on what time is it.

With this feature we will have sudden bursts of questions which is not very good - some of the questions will not be noticed quickly in the "prime time" where there're lots of users that could answer them right away.

I guess it would be better to change the "pop up" algorithm slightly so that it pops up the question every several hours for the first one or two days after it being asked - currently Community does this for questions that are very old - they pop up once suddenly.

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  • You sum it up best. I'll mark this answer to the question in hopes that people stop downvoting me.
    – Justin Dearing
    Commented Jul 31, 2009 at 13:06
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Hmm... And if questions are showing up so fast that they roll off the main page, and overwhelm the most popular tags?

If you take this to the extreme, you'd have every question for the day posted at 16:00 GMT.

And then anyone wanting to answer them would be left to sort through the pile.

Sounds like a recipe for more ignored questions to me...

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I don't think this would be a good feature. If you can be around at some of the "peak" times, I absolutely encourage you to wait until then to post your question if you want. However, I believe the askers involvement is often important for a good question to occur and allowing user's to delay the asking of their question would allow and encourage them to ask questions, even if they wouldn't be able to participate or respond to any questions that arise. Many times the asker won't provide all the relevant information initially because they don't know all the pieces involved; which is likely part of why they're asking.

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  • Its true having a dialog would help. However, assume lets assume one asks a question at 7pm (their time zone) and then leaves their office. They are going to want to ask their question at peak times when they will be able to create that dialog with the users on the site. However, it would be nice if they could ask all their questions the night before while they are fresh in their mind, and have one last thing to do before leavinf their office.
    – Justin Dearing
    Commented Jul 30, 2009 at 23:24
  • @Justin, that sounds very similar to the feature request linked following, which I think is a pretty good idea meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1177
    – Timothy Carter
    Commented Jul 30, 2009 at 23:29

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