To flag or not to flag question that don't show own effort?

Question

I am a little confused about what do with questions that are just asking

"I want this and that (...) and I want it to look exactly like that (...) please help"

without showning ANY own effort?

According to this answer those kind of answers are not welcome

also the so tour says those questions should not be asked:

Don't ask about... Questions you haven't tried to find an answer for (show your work!)

But does this mean that I should flag those kind of "helpdesk" questions or not? And if yes as what? low quality ? flag for moderator attention ? Or is just adding a kind comment asking for the asker's own attempts enough?

Answer 1

First off, if a question doesn't show any of the effort made to resolve the problem down vote it!

Down-voting poorly-asked questions is immensely important - if you do nothing else, at least do that!

With that out of the way, ask yourself: is this question answerable? Not necessarily by you, but by anyone! If it's missing crucial details, then select "it should be closed for another reason..." and "unclear what you're asking"^*; if it's simply asking too much then it's Too Broad. If you can't even begin to make sense of what it's asking, Very Low Quality is a good choice.

If it's answerable, then leave it be - you may not want to put the effort in, but perhaps someone will. If it turns out that a large number of people have the same question, it could still be useful to keep around. If no one cares to answer it and no one else shares the problem, then it'll end up being automatically deleted after a while - no need to waste anyone else's time by flagging it.

^{*_{There's an off-topic reason for these as well with specific guidance - use it if you want to give the asker specific guidance.}}

Answer 2

First, as Shog mentioned you can downvote it.

But in addition I often find these questions hard to answer, if not impossible. If I ask how to make an apple pie, and I don't indicate whether I know how to bake any kind of pie, or how to peel and slice apples, or even what an apple looks like (I might come back from the grocery store with carrots) you probably can't help me. You have no idea where to start. If the person doesn't appear to have chosen a programming language, an operating system, any frameworks, etc, how can you help them?

I vote to close these as Unclear What You're Asking and in my head I'm saying Unclear What Help You Need. Are you asking "please teach me C#, the concepts of database design, WPF, and how to architect a distributed system" or "why am I getting a null reference exception" ? I can't tell. So I can't answer. And questions that can't be answered should be closed.

If they've managed to provide enough information to make it clear what they want, then consider closing as Too Broad if what they want is "how do you build an ecommerce system?" or "I am writing my own operating system, how do I do that?" If they've written a clear crisp question whose answer would be of a reasonable length, and you can tell exactly what level of detail they need in that answer because you know what they already know and precisely what their problem is, but for some reason you feel they didn't try enough, well go ahead and just downvote. But I bet that never happens.

See also my answers to “first show your effort and then ask for help” comments and Do I have to write “I have tried” when I ask something?