The point of this sub is that questions get answered by subject matter experts with definitive, well-researched answers. There is a very finite number of people qualified to answer most questions on this sub and it's not their full time job.

Under that system most new questions will go unanswered, that's just the way it is. You can go to r/AskHistory or just post in both if you'd like different "types" of answers. I see a few people have posted complaints recently but to me it seems like they're just asking this sub to essentially turn into r/AskHistory. Which is a fine sub! But why change this one when you can just go there?

Edit: one thing I'd add is a lot of questions are repeats, which is why you see so many responses linking to old answers. I know stackoverflow will do a search on keywords while you're typing and suggest questions to check before you ask - I don't know if that can be implemented in reddit but that's almost what we need.

A lot are actually covered in the FAQs! A lot of questions are also essentially unanswerable as-is, and sometimes those get the best answers because the person addresses what they're asking and the problem with it, and provides an answer that gets at the spirit of their question instead. But that's more work than even the normal straightforward questions so lots of times they get nothing. The moderators have a very gentle hand when it comes to moderating questions, which is good because sometimes "bad" questions draw good answers, but it means the new posts feed fills up, and "good" questions can get lost in the shuffle I think.

Edit again: one more thing to add - when you see an interesting question with no answers, try searching the sub for an answer. I think you'd be surprised - odds are if the question is interesting someone's thought of it before. If you find one feel free to link to it and tag the original answerer. You get your answer and you help other people who are curious. And if you can't find an exact answer but find a good one that's sorta adjacent, say something like "while we wait for a more specific answer here's this..." And this has the added advantage of tagging someone who might be able to answer.

Either suggestion essentially turns us into r/history or r/AskHistory. Personally, I see absolutely no point in doing so - they're doing a good job at being them, while we are doing a good job at being us. It's like asking r/JohnCena to allow pictures of John Cena. Allowing OP to request relaxation of the rules for their specific question adds much to the workload while also weakening our Unique Selling Proposition - in other words, it's exactly not what we want.

Further, it is legitimately time-consuming to write an answer that meets our standards. Speaking for myself, I take approximately four hours to dash off a quick response that's largely self-plagiarised, and that's after having spotted the question maybe half an hour after it was posted. Now, bear in mind that I'm a homebody with a work-from-home job and I set my own hours, and that I'm an amateur with a very specific area of study. What more for those people who have to cover a larger subject, when they (presumably) have a job that takes up more of their time and cannot so readily alter their schedule, on topics that may require hours or days of research? If the topic requires twelve hours of research time but a prospective answerer only has four free hours in a day, well. (How many days before this answerer can start on their answer is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Edit, because I forgot to put this in before hitting the button: We've polled our flairs, and the single largest factor affecting their ability or not to answer is lack of time. As in, on the results, it outnumbered every other listed reason several times over. Give them time. You can repost your question if you don't receive an answer, as long as you allow for 24 hours to let all timezones see it.

Over the past few months, I've posted 6 questions and received two answers, with one being links to similar questions.

I'm sorry you haven't always been getting answers. We do get many a day (at the time of writing, 97 non-meta questions in the last 24, not counting short answer thread) and we get over a hundred answers a week (not counting the links given ones) so there is always a gap.

It seems the front page is riddled with unanswered questions with most responses filtered.

I believe that is one of those "what AskHistorians tries to do" vs "what reddit does" clashes. The new/hot (lots of recent upvotes on the question) gets highlighted, not always the "and just has been given an amazing answer" though the mods do a lot of work to provide ways for people to more easily find what has been answered and to highlight the best answers.

Could we not add flairs so that the OP could choose whether to allow unmoderated responses?

I'm going to assume unmoderated in the sense of "delete racism, spam and the horrors of the internet but keep the rest"

So as others have set out, this would go against the purpose of this place and would be providing the same service as other history reddits. What may also be influencing the question is the idea that a lot of the deletions are answers that might be useful. u/Georgy_K_Zhukov on his profile includes examples of what gets deleted I would highlight an image from two years ago of what was deleted in one thread

Would those kinds of answers really help anyone if left up?

Edit: I would also point to this discussion in the short questions thread, as is pointed out there, a lot of the deletes aren't even attempts at answers.

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Or could we open up the question after a certain time to casual responses?

So as u/DanKensington mentioned, even a relatively short answer usually takes hours (even without work and life getting in the way) thanks to research and the time taken to actually write it up. Multi-post answers can take a bit more time, to say the least

People's freedom to write up even a "this will take a few hours" short answer will vary so they may save it up and come back to it when time allows. We don't want to rush people into answering for fear of missing a deadline before the question is opened up, we don't want people who need to go into multi-post answers to properly answer a question being put off. If people need a week, a month or more due to the question or their own time-scale, AH will wait for them and when they post, highlight it.

I would also suspect that, with a short answer taking several hours and need to give people a fair chance (what if they are waiting for the weekend when they are free? If posted at the weekend, what about those who are busy during weekends?), that by the time it would be "opened up" it would be too late for the question to still be on the front page. So not likely to get the suggested positives while meanwhile, the downsides of doing so could damage what this place aims to do.

In general terms: there are other history reddits as has been highlighted, each serving a different market by the way they do things. I don't think it helps anyone if we do the exact same thing as them.

Here, you won't always get an answer (but you are free to repost it after a time to see if one can have better fortune). The policy here is no answer is better than someone getting a factually incorrect, outdated or unhelpful answer that sends them down the wrong route with understanding the past.

For the questioners and readers, it is certainly true that you ask a question (or are interested in one particularly) it might not get answered that time. A question might be too broad or too narrow to answer properly, not spotted by someone who can answer (though there are measures to try to ensure really good ones get flagged) and then simply said expert might just not have enough time free due to work/life which is a major problem.

However, if one of the more than a hundred a week answers, it will be a proper answer. Not just an "I heard" or a quick google/wiki or a sounds right (there are so many myths and misunderstandings in history, here we try to nix them). Nor will it be a one-liner that, even if correct, is of no help understanding why the answer is what it is. It will be someone, be they amateurs like myself or published historians, who have delved into the primary and secondary sources, understands the history they talk about and will provide an in-depth answer that will give the answer and explain it so hopefully, the reader comes out feeling they have learnt a lot more.

For those who want to write, we ask more than most reddits but the bar isn't too high. Writers are expected to put the work in, no winging it or lazy answers, we expect people to know the sphere they are talking about, they need to provide an answers that in-depth and comprehensive so correct and quality is expected. In exchange, as well as talking about a subject they love, the proper answers requirement and heavy modding ensure that their well-researched answer is not competing against an improper but far quicker to write answer. It doesn't matter if the answer is within 24 hours, a week, a month or takes even longer, the hole won't be filled in while you work via a myth, a lazy answer, an incorrect one. When you post it, your hard work will be picked up via methods like the Sunday Digest rather than forgotten and neglected.

If we take that away, make it so that if they don't hit a deadline before it comes for the casual answer, then they will see answers that will grab the attention and upvotes by being first even if it is no incorrect, outdated or unhelpful, the answers here lose credibility and we risk putting people off who want to answer but need time to do so, time not provided by a deadline. We lose why people come here both with questions and to answer.

I hope this helped

This is /r/AskHistorians, not /r/AskAnybody. Many new subscribers pass through a time of confusion before they finally achieve enlightenment and appreciate that no answer to a question (or ,God forbid, having to wait for a good answer) is better than a deluge of bad answers.