There are a lot of questions that show no attempt at solving the problem oneself. This is by no means the only problem with questions (the main others that come to mind is asking others to debug your code and not describing the problem with your code properly), but let's focus on this for now - this question can largely be read with the others in mind.
And I'm not talking about "Plz hlp, rite codez 4 mez!" type questions. These get plenty of downvotes and get closed quick enough. I'm talking about the questions that actually look fairly decent, at least on the surface - they often explain the problem clearly, they may show examples of what they want, but they're still lacking a visible attempt at solving said problem.
Most of these get a "What have you tried?" type comment (with a few upvotes) fairly quickly, but many of these aren't downvoted at all / upvoted more, don't accumulate any close votes and get answers (and most of the time the OP's don't add some attempt at solving the problem themselves, even though many say "I have searched" and "I have tried", but it's easy to say you've done something without having actually done it - it's called "lying").
I've primarily noticed this problem in algorithm, sql and regex (on my other main tags the questions tend to get downvoted to infinity and closed, but not always either).
Can we make an effort to close questions sooner and be more strict on at least having to show some attempt? Personally, I think we should try to close these questions as soon as they're asked (in like 5 minutes or less). It doesn't really help that we stick around, waiting for OP to give an attempt when other people upvote it and give answers.
Sure, this won't really add to the 'niceness-factor', but only at first (hopefully) - once people grow accustomed to the fact that we're actually enforcing these rules we're currently only selectively applying, help vampires should find themselves another lair and everyone else should make an attempt before asking a question, thus average quality of the questions should improve a lot, and the "What have you tried?" comments should stop / get a lot less.
Keep in mind that questions can be reopened. We even wanted to highlight this by changing the display from "closed" to "on hold". In my opinion, it's better to quickly close bad questions and have them reopened after being edited, or deleted and re-asked properly.
Some examples I just gathered of questions asked during the last day: (some are downvoted and some closed, but part of my point is that this doesn't happen soon enough)
- Find sum of subset with multiplication
- what is amortized complexity in splay tree?
- Find next higher element in an array for each element
- Division of a convex hull into two separate parts
- Average case complexity - calculation for linear algorithm
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19726156/using-rules-to-get-from-one-number-to-another-with-the-least-number-of-steps
- analysis algorithm - recurrence equation (tower of hanoi)
- How do I solve this using max flow?
sql:
- select all products and related products for a categoryid in sqlite
- SQL QUERY MERGE TWO ROW DATA
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19726369/mysql-sum-column-values-based-on-status-value-from-the-same-table
- Return first char in string that is number
- Postgres add unique constraint
- Finding Duplicates based on condition in SQL
- Regex to remove consecutive special characters greater than specified count
- How to change the contents between "{" and "}" using sed?
- Removing dangling CR in a file using C#
- How to select all similar codes in Notepad++ with Regex
- regex to remove everything after the last dot in a file
- Struggling with htaccess and regex
- Validate mathematical Equation
- Practically all questions tagged with [notepad++] as well.