How can I attract the experts to answer my very specific question?

Question

So I asked a question recently that hasn't picked up any answers. Obviously this is not your typical question that most people can answer. What can I do to help advanced programmers find and answer my question? For example, maybe the question be made clearer or the tags and title can be tweaked.

Answer 1

Assuming that you have already done the following:

1. Re-evaluated the question to see if it could be made clearer.
2. Re-evaluated the question to see if it could be made shorter.
3. Engaged with any responses or comments and edited to incorporate feedback.
4. Continued working on the problem on your own and updated the question with new information.
5. Considered a bounty.

Basically the best way to look at each question is "why should they care?"

1. It's easy. Low effort to solve.
2. It's really difficult. Hard effort to solve. (some people love pain)
3. It's high visibility. Lots of rep involved.
4. You're clueless. Some people love to help.
5. It's an interesting problem.

Clearly, yours is not (1), it's not really (2) either, it is simply obscure. It is certainly not (3), or (4). So your only option is (5).

Basically, you have a very factual and dry questions. Unfortunately, it provides no incentive for anyone to sacrifice their time to answer it, because all they would (most likely) do is use google or bing to find the answer, which is something that you've already done.

However, if you can rephrase your question and question title into a problem that is interesting or actionable then you might get some people willing to sink their teeth into it.

Create a scenario where the problem is in code and you "can't" figure out what it's doing/suppose to do. Give them a concrete starting point, and a quantifiable goal (the answer), and then they'll spend some time trying to help you.

Then, once you've edited it that way, and still had no bites, it might be worth tossing out a bounty to get the attention of the bounty-hunters.

Answer 2

Put a bounty on it, perhaps? You've got 12.6k rep - drop a spectacular bounty on it and see what happens.

Answer 3

1. Perhaps cast the question in terms of one of the dialects of ECMAScript, JavaScript or ActionScript. For instance, provide an example (even an on-line demonstration) in JavaScript that demonstrates the problem. The audience for ECMAScript is probably much smaller than for either of those two languages, and the experts might be more code-centric.

2. Come up with a catchy title.

3. Post a question about it on Meta Stack Overflow. Ahh... wait a minute!

If that does not work, use a bounty.

Answer 4

You've already got a 100% accept rate, which always helps. :)

Answer 5

Basically the same advice we give in the faq.

In order to get good answers, you have to put some effort into your question. Edit your question to provide status and progress updates. Document your own continued efforts to answer your question. This will naturally bump your question and get more people interested in it.