While the mods have stated time and time again that they will not add an answered tag, I think an unanswered tag would be useful to mark questions in which all responses have been deleted. Sorry if this post is short or rule breaking.
How about "unaddressed" as I think unanswered created implications about responses and questions that may not be correct.
Great idea though :)
One thing I want to highlight here as someone who regularly answers questions is that answering a question takes time. We usually get one popular thread per day (i.e. one that hits all with 1000+ upvotes) and from my experience, the gap between let's say 350 and 900 upvotes closes very quickly, in the matter of a couple of hours. Provided one user with expertise sees such a thread, it can take a couple of hours to research and write something up (if I am not intimately familiar with a topic but know where I can look it can take me 2-3 hours to write an extensive answer). In that time, a thread can hit all and have already a number of removed comments because people start jumping in with comments like "Where is the answer?", "[removed]", and "The Jews are at fault" (seriously, this happened twice in the last two days).
So basically by the time, a user with expertise has written an answer, a thread has already exploded and people are up in arms about removed comments. The interesting thing is that few of these threads ever go unanswered (I can think of only two in the last two weeks who didn't get an acceptable answer at some point), so usually it is only a matter of checking a couple of hours later to get an answer.
And as someone who answers questions, some of which get popular (Hitler!), rather frequently, such tags would only frustrate me, because an answer tag would probably lead to no one looking at an answer that comes late but that I have put a lot of work in while an unanswered tag would maybe save some people two clicks and three minutes of reading but also make the phenomenon of posts a la "this has not been answered, so I'll give it a shot" worse as well as it would not stop the posts complaining why this hasn't been answered yet when it is sitting at all with 900 upvotes.
I really like this idea and share OP's frustration when I click a question that seems to have multiple comments only to find they're all deleted. And I think /u/Hegar and /u/NoHomoDickPic's wording ideas of no responses or unaddressed are further improvements over unanswered.
But whose duty would it be to remove the no responses tag (assuming the tag is affixed to all posts when first posted)? Or is the no responses tag placed on a question after comments are removed? The mods already do so much here, it seems like the last thing we should be doing is asking them to do more. But if it's on the question-asker, he or she may not be around for a while after asking the question or may remove the tag after receiving an answer that does not fulfill the requirements for a top-level comment.
Would a post that still has its no responses tag get more attention from potential answerers than a post from which the no responses tag had already been removed?
I'm honestly wondering how OP or others see such a tag working, not trying to find faults with it for fault's sake. I like the idea and would be interested it it being implemented in a way that wouldn't compromise any aspects of this sub.
One other practical and intellectual problem with this, along with the others that have been discussed, is who decides when a question has been 'answered' or 'addressed'. And then who decides if it needs to go back to being 'unaddressed'.
A very recent example involving me. In this thread OP asked about pre-modern immigration. Now, if we had an 'unanswered' or 'unaddressed' tag on threads, it would have been gone by the time I saw the question and clicked on it, because it had already been given a long and detailed answer, which was (seemingly) mod-approved and quickly gathering upvotes. It was, however, wrong, in several important ways. I wrote a nice long post gently correcting the original answer, and the post was subsequently removed.
Should we put the 'unanswered'/'unaddressed' tag back on the thread now? It now consists of my rebuttal of a deleted post (which does add some discussion to OP's questions but also large chunks of other material about slaves and serfs which have nothing to do with the topic) and a discussion of the way in which medieval merchant networks operated (once again spawned by the deleted post). OP's question has not been addressed or answered.
The other point is, I guess, if the post had been tagged 'addressed' or 'answered', would we discourage people for challenging posts which are accomplished, detailed and eloquent, but ultimately misleading (like I did). Although the majority of the comment graveyards are one-liners and jokes, I've seen plenty of long, earnest and good-faith efforts to answer questions which, for one reason or another, still don't meet the requirements of the sub. These kinds of posts are often initially left up for hours or days, either to allow the poster to respond to questions about sources etc. or until a flair in that particular topic happens to come along and point out the problem. Having a mod-approved answer might well discourage people, especially knowledgeable newcomers or non-flairs from challenging seemingly-competent but actually flawed answers.
It's certainly a frustrating problem, but given that it takes at most 10 seconds and two clicks to check if a question has a satisfactory response, I think the system we have is probably, on balance, the best we can do for now.
I'd worry that lack of "not answered" would be functionally similar to an answered tag. I wouldn't want any tag of this sort but if it is going to be used, maybe "no responses" would serve the intended function better?
Still I don't really see a need for it. Honestly it warms my heart to open a '9 comments' thread and see no comments - actual moderating is happening!
No problem asking about it, but in technically you're supposed to put [meta] in the title.
I share your frustration and when I was just a reader and not a mod I didn't really understand why we shouldn't have a "answered" tag. I PMed the mods and said we should just have the user mark the thread when it's satisfactorily answers, like CMV or something. But when I became a mod and had to start looking into a lot of people's answers and checking their research I started to realize that in some cases the first answer to a thread that might "satisfactorily answer" the question is sometimes just straight up bullshit, plagiarized from Wikipedia, totally missing the point, or drawing on history books that were 30-40 years old. These don't really answer the question and in many cases break rules and are extremely unhelpful. This is a case where an answered tag is more damaging than helpful. It's already difficult for us as mods to review (nearly) every single post and answer that to ask us to be up to date on the historiography and validity of each field is more or less impossible.
How about "no comments", for when there are only deleted top-level ones? That's all I'd really want out of this tag.
So, I've been reading over the responses, and I think that the fundamental issue here is that /r/AskHistorians doesn't work like the rest of Reddit.
With most subs, something on the front page usually means that it's "done", for want of a better word. The question has been answered, the the story told, or there is a lot of discussion. Because quality answers on this sub take hours or even days to research and write, posts that reach the front page are things that people want to get answers to.
I'm not sure it's a problem that can be fixed - That being said, I think that /u/huck_'s proposal is the best compromise I've seen so far - A bot that checks posts from the last x time period for top level comments of greater than y words, and tags the post with that number. I think it's the closest any proposal I've seen has come to tagging a post with potential answers, without suppressing further discussion. Though, I still worry that it would put pressure on people to answer posts without long top level comments.
I agree that "Answers" is the best option. It lets people know at a glance that there are replies at try to address the question. It doesn't create as much work as "Unanswered" which both needs a bot to tag it then untag it. It also doesn't get into the sticky territory of presuming answers provided are sufficient (answered - past tense - thread has been addressed no need for further posts!). As well it doesn't really get nitty gritty over whether the answer was complete. It just says "Hey there's some stuff to read in this one" or in its absence "This hasn't been answered at all!"
Is it possible to have link flair that a bot can automatically add when the number of responses significantly differs from the number of "actual answers"?
By answer I mean responses that have not been deleted.
Different variations of this should be possible.
I'm not sure what is possible to do with a bot (or with flair for that matter), but the important parts here I guess is that it would mostly solve OPs problem, it's objective and it does not lead to more work for the mods, since it's automatic.
Hey guys, after reading the responses here I want to say that I really appreciate all that you do, both the mods and the experts who take time out of their day to write up these amazing answers. This is my favorite place on the Internet, and I wish I had the credentials to contribute
Have a bot that counts how many top level comments there are with more than say 500 characters, and have a tag for that number. So if there are 3 top level comments with 500 characters, the tag will say "3". The bot can check every thread from the last 24 hours every 30 minutes. So if one is deleted it can change the count. If there are no such comments there just wouldn't be a number.
I think it would be good idea to have months with unanswered questions catalogued in the side bar so people can go back and answer them.
Ok, as a sort of official response by the mods to this:
First, the comment count including those posts we removed (we can't delete posts) is a reddit feature we can't influence. If we could make the comment count decrease when we remove posts, we would.
As for the tag idea, so far there have been a couple of problems with this:
Balancing interests. We love all our users and want to improve everyone's experience here. However, we do have different groups in this sub, whose interests differ slightly on some issues: Those who ask, those who answer (if regularly flaired), those who read, and us mods. In this case, we have seen very little support / want of tags from the flaired users, i.e. those who answer questions regularly. Most of what we heard so far is rather opposed to this because it would impact them and their willingness to provide answers. The problem here is that we need to find a way to balance someone's willingness with putting an hour or more into an answer and those who express frustration at having to click at a thread and find no answer.
Decision making. Who decides when a question is answered or unanswered? As mods we usually stay on top of research, almost always check the info in comments, and make an effort to enforce out rules vis a vis comments being correct, in-depth, and informative as best as we can. And yet, we are not infallible and some questions do not have one definite answer but rather a whole number of possible answers. Sometimes, it is not possible for us to make the call when a question is answered or remains unanswered, especially if an answer within the rules only answers partially. History as a part of the humanities often allows for a whole slew of answers to one question. Take for example one of our most highly upvoted questions of all time, Before Hitler and the Nazi's, was there another go-to historical "worst person ever"?, a question we get fairly often. This thread, which seems straightforward at first, has several different, equally valid answers depending on where and which culture. After which one is the question really answered?
Work load and scale. In July alone, we've 2,447 submissions (of which 2,163 were approved). We usually receive more than a hundred questions a day, not all of which are answered unfortunately but a considerable number of them is. And of those over hundred questions a day, one usually goes on all and people's front pages. These are the questions that people talk about here, the ones where after a couple of minutes on all we see all the comments posted, we have to remove ("Where are the comments?", "Why is there no answer?", "[removed]"). So out of the hundreds of questions asked and of the tenths of questions answered, it is usually one where this phenomenon becomes pertinent. Going through everyone of these questions and answers to always keep the tags updated is asking a lot of a team of 37 people.
That all said, after having seen this desire expressed several times over the last couple of days, the mod team will put their heads together and try to figure out a solution for this problem. We are committed to making the experience of this sub the best possible for all our users and while we can't promise that we will figure out a solution right away, we will certainly do our best to address this problem.
Thank you!
Personally, I don't usually go back to a thread if I click on it once and see 40-50 removed posts. It's more impractical. So if I saw an "Unanswered" tag, I'd be more inclined to wait to click on it.
For logistical purposes, I'd apply the "Unanswered" tag for the first few hours, and I'd clear it only if there is a response, not posted by the original poster (in case there is a clarification post), that has any substantive value whatsoever (i.e., it isn't removed once a moderator has seen it). The mods already made judgment calls on what responses add to the discussion based on extensive rules, so the argument that it'd be difficult to decide if a question has been "answered" seems a bit moot to me.
There is the alternative of simply removing the tag once a response with citations has been posted. It might be a bad answer because of numerous reasons, but at least then there is a source people can check and, ideally, use to discuss their interpretation or the reliability of that source.
Alternatively (again), I'd be content if the tag was simply removed when a flaired poster had posted any substantive response. That has legitimate problems, as I do see flaired people post short "I'm not an expert on this but..." responses. But given that the sub has created a hierarchy of who is reliable and who isn't, I instinctively give more weight to a two line post by a flair than I do to a four paragraph post by someone else.
Just my thoughts. Seeing 40-50 removed posts on a topic I'm super excited to read about is often the most frustrating thing I experience on reddit (which is saying a lot).
How about a new subreddit full of direct links to answered questions?
Idea: dunno if it's possible, but have a bot tag the post with the number of non-delete comments. So reddit might report that there are 27 comments, but if 24 of them have been deleted then the bot could tag it as having 3 comments. If that's problematic it could be binned into ranges... '0 surviving comments', '1-10 surviving comments', '10+ surviving comments'. Or something along those lines.
I'm totally sympathetic to the moderation stance, but also somewhat sympathetic to the people who get excited at seeing what looks like a robust academic exploration of a topic of interest only to find a comment graveyard instead. A tagging system like the above could serve to manage expectations appropriately without any fundamental changes to the moderation activities.
What about a "flaired response" or "expert response" tag that mods to add? Then people would know when a quality post had been added.
Alternatively, given the comment /u/commiespaceinvader gave, what about if flaired commenters toss up a place-holder post if they believe they have the resources/expertise to answer the question, and mods can flair those posts "being researched" or something so that users know to check back for a thorough answer later?