Confirm post preview for low-rep posts

Question

Those of us who have been using SO (or any SE site for that matter) for a while know that the box where we type our text is not identical to what is posted (because of various markdown capabilities we are given). We also know that there is a display below the text box that shows us what our post will actually look like once we are done, and we know how to format thing the way we would like them to look.

I've noticed a trend where a user will format things nicely (or somewhat nicely) as plaintext where they type, and ignore the fact that it is not at all formatted like that in the actual post (despite the fact that it is displayed, live, directly below where they are typing). Lists that are meant to span several lines appear as a single string across one line running onto several, code is partially code-formatted, etc...

I suggest that new users and users with many third-party edits (corrections by more experienced users), be prseented with a confirmation dialog when posting confirming that they have, in fact, checked out how their post will actually appear once posted, and that it is accurate. To address concerns regarding reduced conversions, a possible solution would be to bypass the dialog for absolute first posts, since those will be in First Post review queue anyway.

This will:

• Make it easier for everyone to read
• Reduce the amount of editing we have to do to make things readable
• Make it easier to take new, serious posters seriously, as their questions won't look lazy and effortless due to lack of formatting.

Mock up of dialog to be displayed:

Possible criteria for whether to display dialog:

if posts == 0:
    False
if posts < 5:  # questions AND answers
    True
if third_party_edits / posts > .3: # 30% "fixed" by others
    True

Answer 1

First of all I think this is a good idea. Asking a question should be something that is given thought, and taking the time to ensure that the question is formatted properly is a part of that. "Training" new users to learn about markdown, and SO's formatting seems like a sensible thing to do.

I'm not sure about the conditions however. Maybe I'm a really bad speller (I am) and I get a bunch of edits, but I always format my posts beautifully. If there is a way to query the reason for edits maybe it could work.

Answer 2

Rather than try to adjust user behavior with all the carrot and stick incentives, we should look to how we can adjust the Stack Overflow behavior so that the final view that will be seen is more apparent to the user. (For example, look at the MailChimp.com final form HTML editing or that of many other products.)

We should spend our time lobbying for improving the tools folks use here on SO rather than educating users in an older paradigm (what you see is not what you get).

Answer 3

Came looking to make a very similar suggestion and found this old post.

To start, let's presume it's already determined the current user may need extra help to ask a good question. The specifics of criteria can be examined separately.

I think there should be new post state: "draft". A "draft post" would be distinct from the "textarea draft" feature. It should be much more similar to a normal submitted question -- it's actually submitted and displayed just like a normal question is.

The most important ways a "draft post" would be different are:

• include helpful suggestions & links to this user, e.g. How To Ask (also congratulatory messages for new users)
• signal to readers that the post may not be "ready", similar to new users having the "New Contributor" badge.
• actually look and feel like a normal post, in contrast to the textarea preview and popup modal suggestion
• this eagerly accepts imperfect submissions and trains users to go back to edit & improve an already-submitted question

Some concerns and possible ways to address/mitigate:

• lot of noisy "draft posts" -- perhaps they should be hidden from most users like deleted posts are and only the submitter and (optionally) higher-rep users can see them
• too many abandoned "draft posts" -- can choose to revert to today's behavior and auto-submit after X time, auto-expire drafts after Y time, or enforce a "max N drafts limit" like "textarea draft" feature does
• feature overlap with "Review your question" -- yes, but the semantics of a "draft post" are different (see "go back and edit", above). An alternative way to think of this entire suggestion is to "change Review your question feature look and act a lot more like a normal post, just with extra visual annotations".

Answer 4

Though I consider this as a good suggestion, I want you to note that it depends on users. I've seen users with more than 500 rep posting poorly formatted posts. Only the HTML formatting may be unaware for the new users. In all these cases there are a lot of experienced people here who are willing to format the post for them :) and I'm sure most of them will learn on the way.