Filter questions by user reputation [duplicate]

Question

It is possible to filter questions by user reputation ? I.e. if you mind to solve today more difficult questions and not ordinary (i know about featured questions but it is not same i mean).

Or you just want answer today on questions for users which reputation>100, because not feel good to filter newbie info.

Say it may be implemented as minimum asker's reputation in filter, may be minimum asker rating should be not more than half of your own.

Other case - you want learn a theme, and got guru info, so you can filter by tag and by minimum answerer reputation.

.

Answer 1

I sympathize eicto. It is a little frustrating (especially on php/js tags) when the majority of questions are posted by new users asking some permutation of the same 10 questions or just totally misunderstanding how the language works. It's also frustrating watching the bicycle shed problem and fastest gun in the west in action (too much reputation and attention are given to the most trivial issues).

And I agree that allowing some form of rep-filtering would help mitigate this to some extent, but the benefits aren't worth the cost:

• Excellent questions from low-rep users languishing for lack of an expert's input
• Correction of inaccurate information that's been provided in an answer (more than once I've had a high-rep user correct a small-but-important inaccuracy in an answer I've provided to a simple question asked by a low-rep user.
• Alienation of potentially valuable new members who might not feel that the community has a lot to offer because their early experiences with it didn't receive the high-level answers they expected.

Personally, I'd like some form of filtering, I just think that rep is a lousy heuristic for finding only "interesting/complex" questions. My suggestions:

1. I love Pekka's suggestion to allow users to follow questions that have been highlighted by users they trust/select.

2. some improvement in the "Sort by Votes" function. To my knowledge there is no way to limit this result by date-range, which basically renders it static and basically useless. If there were a way to sort questions by vote by time-block:

      `from today`,`from this week`,`from this month`,`all time`
   

   This has been suggested but I'm not sure if it's actually going to be implemented.

3. Add a filter sorting by "Favorite"-ed questions... hopefully with date filters as above.

I think these-types of approach, which let other users weight questions rather than relying on the relatively arbitrary metric of rep woul help with this issue while protecting (in Martin Clayton's words) the

"'SE way' [...] to treat each post on face value"

Answer 2

There is this saying that "a fool can ask more questions than seven wise men can answer". And while that does not match this situation completely, my point is that reputation does not necessarily reflect the difficulty of the question asked. Nor do I think it's a particularly good filter.

What if we have an experienced developer joining our site, who starts out with a rep of 1 like anybody else, but with a great question?

What if we have a high-rep user active in a specific tag, but who asks a somewhat uninformed question on a topic unfamiliar to him because he's a newbie but wants to learn?

Reputation might sometimes give you an indication, but I think it would make for a pretty poor filter.

To check whether a question has your interest or not only has to take seconds. And often you don't even have to read further than the title. I would rather that users be bothered by the occasional question they have no interest in, than miss the excellent question from a user who is just new to the site.

Answer 3

If I understand what you're asking for correctly I see one big problem, which is that the 'SE way' is to treat each post on face value, with the rep of the OP being irrelevant. Other meta requests to add user-focussed functionality are always frowned upon, and with good reason. (Of course, the community as a whole can't help but be hypocritical, so we have thousands of comments about low rates of answer acceptance, which bear no relation to the question at hand.)

Having said that, I can see the utility in your suggestion. I visit the site casually and so rarely 'intersect' with a question of interest I can answer. A filter based on OP rep at time of posting would I'm sure eliminate a lot of chaff, after all, surely the number of ill-informed noob questions is greater than the number of high-rep user 'golden nuggets'?

This suggestion on its own seems harmless as an option. For most answerers the noob questions are part of the bread and butter of earning rep. We're not going to all flock to the well-researched well-written questions of high-rep users, because they will be hard, and mostly not in our areas of expertise. But, once user- or rep-based filtering appears, it's a slippery slope away from the egalitarian modus operandi that has made these sites work. So I can't support this idea.

I suggest that you use a vote-based filter to find interesting material instead. The community is pretty adept at identifying the good stuff.