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I recently came across this low-quality post on Stack Overflow (Revision history link). The entire thing was made from a single link:

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This gave me an idea for some heuristics which would block some low-quality questions from being posted. Questions which are entirely:

should be disallowed from posting. After all, there is no reason why a question should be entirely formatted like above — while you may bold your question at the bottom of your post and use italics for emphasis on certain words, no post should be entirely bold, italic or linked.

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  • 3
    Maybe ALL CAPS too, if they are not already detected.
    – PolyGeo
    Commented Nov 14, 2016 at 9:08
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    @PolyGeo they aren't—I see them all the time. So yes, PLEASE ADD ALL-CAPS!!!
    – Cai
    Commented Nov 14, 2016 at 9:24
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    @Cai <bragging>Software Engineering (formerly known as Programmers) has ALL CAPS block for over a year now</bragging> (was such a relief to get it)
    – gnat
    Commented Nov 14, 2016 at 9:44
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    Argh... why would that not be network wide!?
    – Cai
    Commented Nov 14, 2016 at 9:49
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    Or... just let the community edit these out? These seem easy enough to edit out.
    – Oded StaffMod
    Commented Nov 14, 2016 at 9:54
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    @Oded yes, we could do that... but having to edit 20+ of these per day gets a little annoying
    – angussidney
    Commented Nov 14, 2016 at 10:02
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    @Oded since the system already blocks certain bad stuff (e.g. "problem" in title), it's a fair suggestion to add more auto blocks.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Nov 14, 2016 at 12:21
  • 4
    Related: BLOCK QUESTIONS IN ALL CAPS
    – ale
    Commented Nov 14, 2016 at 15:19

2 Answers 2

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Your example is from Stack Overflow and this made me wonder, why don't such questions go to queue?

I mean, I can imagine SE team being hesitant to block them outright for maybe they haven't yet decided if there could be some kind of risk to block some legitimate questions, I can buy that, okay.

But why don't they put them into Triage? This is safe FFS, if there are indeed (I bet exceedingly rare) worthy questions, let reviewers save these.

Let folks who decided to do triage do it and save stuff worth saving, but please spare regular users expecting regular questions from seeing stuff that is 99.999% garbage.

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We can always say that today we are drawing the line at 100% CAPS and tomorrow we will be discussing 50% and so on.

I really like the bold or caps because it permits the user to show what he/she thinks is most important. The reader also wins because he will be able to read diagonally more efficiently.

The problem is that if you type everything on CAPS then everything is important and so nothing is important. Last but not the least, it is ugly.

Please, if possible BAN the 100% emphasized text.

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