I spend more time on Stack Overflow than I should, and I really getting sick of one thing:
Questions on certain tags, for programming languages which are familiar to many (like JavaScript or PHP), it happens quite often that question from new users are absolutely useless.
They often do little more than state what they want, providing no information on what they tried (if anything), no examples of what they're looking for, etc. Usually these questions have a race between voting to close and downvotes. The person who asked the question probably gets sick of Stack Overflow and won't ask a question again.
I don't like how this is currently handled, and I really do not like to read tons of useless questions.
I know about this page, but it's like the license agreements seen when installing new software: nobody really reads all that stuff, you just skip to the end and click through.
So I would like propose a few changes for users with a reputation < X (100?, 200?) that I hope might help to guide new users:
If the question is shorter than X characters, ask them if they think that their question might be too short/not precise enough.
If there is no code block embedded in the question, ask them if it might help other people to understand if they would add some code showing their work to the question.
If no text formatting / markdown for texts longer than X characters were used, ask them if they saw the possibilities of the editor to make the question more readable. Perhaps even suggest specific formatting (Most lists look like this: "1) first point 2) second point" - this could potentially be detected and the proper syntax noted)
If the question is asked within less than x minute(s) of the Ask page being loaded, ask them to read through what they wrote and check for mistakes and general comprehensibility.
All of this guidance should be mandatory, but if provided then maybe they will start thinking about their question and how it looks to others, and will invest more than 30 seconds in asking it.
I believe this could be big improvement for everybody. New users are happy because their question will be answered more often. Users who answer question will be happy because they do not need to read this not understandable 5 lines of badly written and incomprehensible cry for help.
extraneous use
of formatting, which drives mecrazy
. Warning about no line breaks in long posts might be helpful, though. Point 4 (timing between "Ask Question" and posting) is a good thought but will catch people who typed out ther question elsewhere and are copy-pasting it into the text box on the website.