Getting greatest visibility for my questions [duplicate]

Question

What are good ways to make sure my question has the highest visibiltiy it can so that people will see and answer it?

What do you do to make sure your question is answered quickly and completely?

Answer 1

The stackoverflow users who care about a particular topic tend to keep a fairly close eye on their chosen field, but ultimately there are lots of very good and competent users, and there is a good chance you'll get a decent answer.

In the fast-moving topics you should get decent coverage purely through numbers; for slower-moving topics the gurus will have a better chance to catch up if they occasionally succumb to sleep, the need to eat, or work for a living.

You could also try adding a bounty (at some point) which gives you another chance to attract visitors.

Answer 2

The first thing you can do is use the proper tags on your question to ensure only people interested in that type of technology are the people who are going to see it (primarily). I then tend to look at the persons profile and see if they have any background information which is usually a good indicator if they have experience in that particular area. Also their reputation is a good indication that they are knowledgable and have helped others (sometimes in similar situations/areas). If in doubt, simply just ask the person via a comment.

Answer 3

Tag it with appropriate tags. Those who know a lot about a given subject keeps an eye on tags that may be relevant, and answer what questions they can.

But ultimately, you've got it backwards. No one are paid to answer questions on StackOverflow. You can't demand that anyone reads your question. You have no way of directly asking users to help. You're relying on others finding your question interesting and worth answering.

All you can do is ask a question that everyone can see, and then tag it to make it easy to find for those who are interested in the subject. And put some effort into asking good questions. Provide all relevant information, be polite, spend some time on formatting your question and fixing typos and grammatical errors so that it is easy for people to read and understand.

That's all you can do.

Answer 4

I guess it's mainly about good tagging.

Experts in a given subject certainly have set their "interesting tags" to what they know best/they're more interested in.

Answer 5

As others have already said, using appropriate tags is vital, and having a good rep also helps. From what I've seen, I got the feeling experts are more likely to answer questions that are well phrased. Another apparent trend is that many of the really good answers I've seen tend to be in answers to questions that pose a particularly interesting problem.

Answer 6

Interesting question. Would it be possible for people to register with SO as experts, once they get up to a sufficiently high score in a particular topic area? And then, once there are registered experts, would it be possible to flag a question so that those experts can easily get a list of all such questions tagged with their topic and flagged for expert attention?

This flag would have to be delayed in some way, so that it doesn't take effect until 5 people with editing privileges agree that the question is worthy of expert attention. In other words, the OP adds a provisional flag, and other folks can upvote or downvote that flag. When the flag gets 5 votes, it becomes fixed and will appear on the "questions to experts" list for any tags on the question. Of course, people can still add or remove tags, or edit the question after the flag is fixed.

And maybe the experts can unflag it if they disagree that the question needs to be addressed to experts, and once it is unflagged it can never be reflagged again.