Why are my questions remaining unanswered for a long time?

Question

I have asked some questions in stackoverflow.com. But naturally my others question got comments or answers very quickly. If there is complexity then its okay to be answered late. But I am not even getting comments? Why these happen? But those questions are being viewed at a normal rate. I have improved tagging but still there is no answer. In one case I offered a bounty. But there is no comment. Whats wrong with my approach? Questions links:

1. Remained untouched since 28 jan, 2012.
2. Remained untouched since 17 feb, 2012.

Answer 1

Because they look like small projects.

Also, they have specialized aspects that only a very small amount of people have used or know well enough to provide a fast answer. Your question is basically one that falls into the category of "debug my code for me", and that's difficult to do without the ability to run it in a debugger. :)

If you really cannot figure out the issue that you have with access to debugging tools, imagine how hard it is for other people to psychically debug your code. So if it is not an obvious issue, the time that someone would have to spend in order to help you is so long that it effectively turns into a small project.

Speaking for myself, for example, if I write the audio code for one small part of a program, I look at the manual and examples, then find a solution. But after a month goes by, I forget what I did and am not able to give the answer to someone else.

And in this case, in order to give an answer, I would need to go back and read and remember all that kind of stuff.

---

In general, I think that answers belong in three basic categories:

1. Knowledge / experience. This is the case where someone can look at your code and recognize a similar issue that they have already solved, which makes it easy for them to tell you how to fix it.

2. Logic errors. This is the case where you have a logical design error in your question, and someone else can easily locate it and help you to solve it.

3. Unknown. This is the case where neither of the above situations are true: no one has ever faced the same error nor can they spot an obvious logical error in your code/design.

These three categories can exist together in a line of code. So when your question includes hard-to-discover logical errors because no one knows your design, together with an unknown error, then is hard to get an answer.

The best thing to do is to eliminate logical errors and try to focus on users with the requisite knowledge and experience.

Problems that take more than a life to solve must abandoned. :)

Bounty

Now there is also one case that stackoverflow have predict, and is the case when the question is not seen by the correct person that know the answer.

If you have make a super cool question that ether is a chess like logical game, ether is something that many people have like to ask but didn't, and get 100 votes in one day, then you draw the attention and you get many answers. If not then maybe not the correct person see your question.

So here comes the bounty, to draw the attention to more people and maybe the correct one see and answer. I admire people with 200 points or less that offer bounty and I give them +1, and I say that your trick to draw the attention with a question on meta for your questions is something that I am thinking that can not be done many times because people they avoid bounty and ask here questions.

So bounty is your next best friend advisor.

Problems

This is a general approach. Problems/Questions that seek for Solution/Answers also felt into categories. When code or in life in general, some times we felt into a problem and the categories are:

1. Find an existing solution
2. Search a solution by your self for a limited amount of time.
3. Search a solution for ever. (always avoid :)

A problem is anything that we can not solve it in a snap.

It is a problem every line of code if we do not know programming, so its better to not seek for 1000 lines of solutions, but we find some other existing program that do our job, or quit it for ever, or first learn programming.

I love SO because have give one more tool for case number 1, and I include also the existing questions that is a treasurer of knowledge. To ask a question on SO means that you have search all ready all existing solutions on google yahoo, SO, books etc.

The second step is that you try your self to solve this, then come the question on SO, and then the other people needs in many case to see that you follow and try to solve your issue. There is also the case that we have limited time, I do not think that I can spend too much time for others when I do not spend my self to solve a problem if you know what I mean. So now you are on case 2, I hope that you have search good and say that the case 1 not give you an existing answer, now you need to help together with some other to find the answer.

On this categories that I follow in my life as steps to solve a problem I always stop on the second. And I follow this steps on all my problems, not on programming only.

Follow up

After the bounty the question is still unanswered and here the Tim Post have right, very few people have work with "mjsip".

So the number of people that work with something is also a parameter to have an answer in a logical time frame. The fewer the people the fewer the possibility to get a solution.