Question Quality System

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1

I was thinking about all the AI discussion here, plus a lot of newcomers who don’t post a clear question that also don’t abide basic housekeeping rules.

Would it be a good idea to implement a system similar to ‘thumbs up’ where we can ‘thumbs down’ the question (only the first instance of an open topic), if we think it doesn’t adhere the basic rules..

  • if we suspect it’s an ai code that people don’t understand what it is and asking us to fix it for them
  • if the question is not clear at all
  • if the formatting is very poor

And if it has enough ‘thumbs down’, it can give an automatic alert to the OP to check the forum rules and fix their questions accordingly. It can also mark the topic as ‘poor question’ so we can skip it until it’s fixed by the OP.

And naming of ‘thumbs down’ can be changed of course. Something more positive. Maybe like ‘Needs Improving’

The voting can also be only done by some ‘senior’ members, like admins, profiles with enough number of solutions or being a member for some time…

2

I don’t think this would necessarily work, it would depend on people just thumbing down instead of engaging with that directly, I think that would just make it depend on enough people voting, instead of just encouraging people in the community giving the appropriate feedback

3

Plus we can flag stuff for the appropriate reasons

4

I suspect a thumbs down system would be abused, and would not be a good way to communicate anything specific that might be wrong

5

I am trying to help as much as possible to people here. But the amount of poor questions have been significantly increased recently or maybe this is just my biased view.

But I’m started to be irritated that when I spend my time to help people, they don’t even bother to read rules and try to understand before posting something. And then you spend your time to write a message that doesn’t sound rude, while we are trying to say is ‘YOU DIDN’T EVEN READ THE BASIC FORUM RULES AND YOU EXPECT US TO USE OUR TIME TO HELP YOU?’ without sounding like an asshole. And that takes a lot of energy. (OK I’m exaggerating a bit but you got the gist of it :slight_smile: )

‘Thumbs down’ function is very straightforward, it’s basically will tell them to read the rules and improve their post.

And for the abuse; I added this to my post as an edit but maybe you missed it:

6

If only trusted users are able to use it then it feels like it completely loses its value, in that case the responsible thing is to just comment, simple

I think the best way to deal with this is to just send a good friendly message suggesting reading the help instructions, I think an automated message will be far worse and just having people downvote your comment instead of just writing would be more rude

You can just have a message prepared and just paste it, that’s what I do when I do triage and moderation on GitHub

7

Thing is, especially when someone is entirely new to this, you cannot up front know if it is indeed someone who does not make an effort.

Down-voting, even if restricted to ‘senior’ members as you put it, might turn an open and inviting safe space into something different entirely. It’s a precious balance you should - I think - try and cherish.

8

I really don’t think safe space is anything to do with my proposal. People feel what they feel. You can be the kindest person and some people can still feel like attacked. We can’t control other people’s feelings and noone here is any responsibility towards that. As long as we are not being rude or a bully, we should not be thinking about that otherwise who can decide where to stop. People also needs to learn how to deal with negative emotions, that by itself imho is a big issue nowadays, but it’s a whole different topic anyway :slight_smile:

Also they may have make an effort but if they still have very obvious mistakes, it means they didn’t make enough effort.

The term ‘downvoting’ can be changed to make it more positive as I mentioned. You can make it a positive experience depending on the wording and how it’s implemented.

I think people are focused on newcomers too much but not focused enough on the people who is contributing to this forum. Our time is more important than someone who is a newcomer who didn’t make enough effort to understand the forum rules and then when properly notified feeling unwelcomed.

9

That’s making a really unwelcoming assumption though

And how are they helped by not actually helping them and giving them the tools to do things right? Why such an unfriendly and impersonal system instead of just pointing them in the right direction? If you just have an answer prepared it takes exactly as much time to do

10

I really don’t understand what you mean by this reply. If that’s what you understand from what I wrote, I’m sorry but I cannot make a healthy conversation with you about this topic.

11

I’m sorry but I am simply taking what you are saying at face value, perhaps you need to work on conveying what you want to say more clearly so other people will understand it

But to be clear I’m speaking from extensive experience doing triage work on GitHub with people who seem to not care about doing things right and I try to always assume they just don’t know better and try to guide them to the right solution

Have a nice day

12

The people asking the “worst” questions are often the people who need help the most

13

I agree with it. But I never said we should not help them. I simply said they should be reminded the rules automatically if enough people votes that the post is not ‘mature’ or good enough. And if someone wants to help them, they can still help them. I never said the post should be deleted or they should be excommunicated. But for some reason the responses I got is as if I said those things :slight_smile:

14

Please don’t turn this web site into diet Stack Overflow.

15

While I get the intent of where you’re coming from @lastbender and feel your frustration, I honestly don’t think your proposal will help. Because places like StackOverflow, which already have a thumbs down and bounty system are also facing the same problems. In fact, I’ve noticed a big change in the last month of both the quality of questions and frequency of questions going way down.

I think we are seeing the results of a switch in the larger silent community’s acceptance of AI. Typically only about 10% of any given community is vocal online. The rest just do their thing. I think our community is furthermore fractured because I suspect more people use Discord than the forums.

I have become increasingly frustrated over the last month or two with the attitudes and questions asked. Simple questions have almost completely disappeared from the forums. People now are clearly getting those answers from Google searches and LLMs. Likewise, the number of complex questions without context or understanding has increased.

People are now deep in their projects without knowing how they got there, and when asked to give more information, they don’t know how or get offended. I used to provide context when posting this link: Posting guidelines in #Help channel but then people don’t click on it and reply to only whatever things I say in my post. I know they haven’t read it because I wrote most of that post, and they do not follow any of the suggestions - even that of how to format their own code.

The problem with people getting offended is they want answers without effort. They want us to read their minds, understand their projects even though we haven’t seen them, and act like LLMs - not humans with feelings.

Sadly, I’m about at the end of my rope. Answering questions on here of late has become frustrating and is starting to feel like I am being abused. Unfortunately, I just don’t think there’s a solution to the problem. People using LLMs can get into complicated problems faster than we can get them out - and we are not looked upon as a helpful community of people, but as customer service agents that can be abused.

One of the reasons I’ve started to add my open source libraries to Itch.io with paid options is I get more interaction with them that way. Since I cannot put them up on the Godot Marketplace (because they have dependencies), that’s my best option. But just the effort to create monetizable levels of plugins has become draining.

Someone mentioned Eternal September in another thread, and that’s what this forum feels like now - except not only do people not know the rules of engagement, they have no patience or interest in learning them. They just want to use us as LLMs.

Even were downvoting posts available, it wouldn’t help. It’s just as easy to copy-paste the posting guidelines, and people don’t read those already even when politely pointed to them.

16

My solution is for people who wants to help, not for people who doesn’t want to learn. Because as you said, we cannot help those people.

For small number of people who actually ‘makes an honest mistake and reads the guideline’, they can fix their post and it’ll be all good.

The main benefit of my proposal is that, if I see a post marked as ‘Needs Improvement’, I’ll not look at it until it’s fixed by the OP.

I think a lot of people forget that most people who helps here have day jobs and doing this because they want to give back to community, not because it’s their job to do.

17

Fair enough. I just think I’m jaded at this point and burnt out.

18

The fall of stack overflow and other sites of its ilk to free and paid LLM usage is documented, with stats et al. Being going on since 2023, with some dramatic month on month decrease for new questions and general traffic when certain versions of chatgpt were released. One of the articles in that search should be the one I stumbled on a few months ago :

@dragonforge-dev take a break brother, you deserve it. Negative sentiments like those have a way of creeping and slithering into other parts of your life, starting with those adjacents, like general gamedev. Support your pool of users, less time here.

There have been more people trying the forums, which points to Godot growing, which means more experienced and new developers to share travails and successes with :wink:

It also means more BS. Name of the game, not much can be done without risking over regulating.

Cheers !

19

I like this better. It’s a positive frame.

20

I’m so impressed by your contributions here. But I agree with @OleNic there. It should give you energy, not drain it.