I think ask history has most active and thorough moderation team of any subreddit I know. Ultimately, this is a great thing. It ensures that all the answers you find here are well sourced and reliable. The downside is that more than 50% of the time I click on an interesting question and find a barren land, with rows and rows of deleted comments and perhaps a mod message amidst the slaughter chiding commenters for their poor sourcing. This happens very often and each time I think... oh... well... that would have been interesting... guess I'll leave!!
Many other subreddits (e.g. /r/whatisthisthing etc) get around the problem using tags like answered/unanswered. I'm not sure this is completely applicable here, as some questions may be hard to answer definitively. However, if there were some way of showing that someone had provided some sort of interesting answer that hadn't been deleted, I think it would greatly improve my enjoyment of the subreddit.
Mods, commenters, lurkers, what do you think?
This has been discussed virtually ad nauseam: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=unanswered+meta&sort=top&restrict_sr=on&t=all
I, for one, am always amused that basically the only reason anyone ever wants this is because of some frustration at seeing the comment count on a thread with deleted non-answers. The number of man hours spent discussing this question because people think their time is being wasted by hitting the "back" button in an empty thread is astounding.
Hi there, so this has been debated on here many times and I think you can find this discussion and this Rules Roundtable on the topic interesting. The main takeaway being that we are not planning to implement this feature, for several reasons (outlined in the aforementioned threads).
No, thank you.
Who would set the flair? The questioner may not be qualified to do so.
The mods are, I understand, already pretty busy just nuking stupid answers. And, face it, historical interpretation is somewhat a matter of opinion, expert or not. Let one historian say, "yep, that's the answer" and another one, equally qualified, might say, "no, you missed this, that and the other".
As far as I know, objective truth is hardly a common thing in history. Just better or worse interpretations, and those change too.
Don't know if this is the place for it, but is there a way that 'additional questions' can only be allowed once the initial question has been answered?
On a similar topic, why do some threads say "1 comment", yet no matter what type I sort it by, the comment has disappeared? Probably a reddit quirk but it's been driving me nuts on this sub.
I'd like this too - not out of frustration for posts with deleted answers, but rather due to the fact that I rarely ever get any responses on my questions. It seems that it's a matter of luck getting a question answered.
what about a "nonempty" flair?
I would recommend comparing the state of this sub to that of outoftheloop, which is almost identical in scope and function to this sub except that they deal with current events. Differences include the answered/unanswered tags, and also that they don't have "experts" as much. Answers tend to be much shorter and usually include links to other subs, especially with Reddit-related issues, links to news articles etc.. The longest comments tend to be much shorter than those around here. This last point may be partly an effect of answered/unanswered tags as they act as a de-motivator for adding information to a question's answer.
Edit: Changed the other sub's link to NP, the downvotes may be coming from there. I'm making a serious suggestion for the question at hand, not promoting the other sub. Edit2: I should also make it clear that I am not advocating addition of these tags; it would be really nice to have a way of knowing if a question has truly been answered, but given the de-motivation effect, I'd have to say I'm slightly against them.