[META] Subreddit user experience issue/question - what’s being done by mods/admins to make it less of a hassle to actually find and read ANSWERED questions?

by wellplayedsirs

Love the sub. It’s one of my favorites. However, it drives me crazy sometimes. I can’t tell you how often I’ve clicked on questions with 20+ comments to be disappointed with “removed,” “deleted,” or just nothing there. Talk about major bummer and a waste of a click.

It wouldn’t be a huge issue except it happens way too much. You can’t have a sub focused on giving great answers without a way to focus readers on those well written answers.

While I believe this sub is well modded, I think this is an annoying trend and can be improved.

What are the proposed solutions and when are they going to be implemented?

EnclavedMicrostate

Essentially, it all boils down to a quirk of Reddit which makes removed comments technically remain so as to dissuade spambots. Unfortunately, /r/AskHistorians mods are powerless to change it. So, that's why you can have loads of removed comments. What are the options?

On our end:

  1. 'Answered' flair - Huge hassle; if an answer turns out to be deeply flawed it might be hard to redact; would conflict with themed and Great Question flairs.
  2. Require comments to be approved before going up - Huge hassle, impractical given size and availability of moderation team.
  3. Military coup against reddit - Probably not viable given the geographical distribution and variable martial capabilities of the flair team.

Put simply we're making the best of a bad situation. However, there are a few things you can do, especially if you're a reader rather than an answerer.

  1. Read the twitter feed. This links only to answers and so literally cannot produce an unanswered question.
  2. Check the age of the thread. Typically a more popular thread takes 9 hours to see an answer. So, if it's less than 12 or so, don't get your hopes up.
  3. Sort the front page by 'hot' rather than 'best'. It's kind of arcane but it sort of works in a way.
  4. Check out the flaired user profiles - many of us flairs have profiles, some admittedly more up to date than others, which usually link to our older answers.

Hope this helped!

meridiacreative

I don't care about unanswered questions. They don't bother me. Even popular questions. This is part of the experience of coming here. Seeing the questions people are asking is just as important to me as seeing the answers people post.

Mods you're doing great.

Gankom

I just wanted to chip in and mention some of the ways you can get that sweet answer fix. I agree fully with /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov and the Automod. This question gets asked a lot, and practically speaking there's little that can actually be done that hasn't been done.

So what can you do if your chomping at the bit for some answers?

There's a twitter! that is constantly posting some of the best questions and answers for you to peruse.

There's also a facebook page for those of you with facebook still, it's got a constant stream of some of the best answers.

There's also a tumblr, which surprised me as I hadn't checked it out in awhile. Askhistorians with pictures! Whats not to love!?

There's also my personal favorite, the Sunday Digest. It tries to round up peoples favorite answers from the week. People can also post questions they really liked but didn't see answered to try and get them more attention.

So if your tired of the [removed], but need to kill some time for a great answer to be made, check out some of the above links to read some great stuff while you wait.

Searocksandtrees

Hi just saw this. You can also view the sub using the /comments tab instead of /hot or /new : that way, you see only the answers that have survived (so far - obviously the most recent may not yet have been reviewed by a mod). /r/AskHistorians/comments

michaelquinlan

https://twitter.com/askhistorians