How do I get treated well on this forum?

Question

I am a little upset with my recent treatment on this forum. I had one question put on hold. I do not know why, I received some boilerplate about not being off topic because it was not or no longer reproducible.

That just seems pretty lazy to me. Tell me what you encountered when you tried to reproduce it, Just an easy sentence or two. Or ask for clarification. Do not just shoot it down under the assumption that I am an idiot asking a dumb question and wasting your time, which is what it felt like.

So I took my licks and reposted with some additional data and also responded to the hold best I could. In my experience with Stack Overflow when a question is tagged it is effectively dead, never to live again so there is no reason to edit. I reposted.

Someone then tagged the new post duplicative. Yes, yes it was. This person obviously did not read and understand either post fully. So I edited the post to point this out and ask that it not be marked such as asked not to be treated like a child.

Obviously this was taken well because my post was deleted very soon after. Sorry if that was petulant, I do not respond to contempt well.

I work very hard on my forum posts, re-examining my problem, trying to frame it in a way than can be duplicated and probably spend far too long crafting them. I can't claim to always be successful, but I do try. When I ask for help, I do not take it for granted, I do not just blow off some text in 10 seconds and move on.

When I answer another's query, I take it just as seriously.

If you believe I made a mistake by reposting rather than editing, say THAT.

So please communicate better, it is MUCH more helpful than some boilerplate. And please understand that people may make some mistakes. Please be patient and help us be better.

Answer 1

I was not involved in voting to close your original question, but when I saw the same question asked again, I voted to close it as a duplicate. We seem to agree that it was a duplicate and unlike on a discussion forum, duplicate questions on a focussed Q&A site like GIS SE are closed as duplicates as soon as they are noticed.

From the history of your question it seems like your comments indicated that you were not in a position to provide more details because your server was down, and this led to it being placed on hold, pending your server becoming available again for you to resume work with the potential answerers on trying to assess and answer your question, if it remained a problem.

As we say on the first page of the Help:

We are not a GIS Software Support Site. We encourage you to seek official routes for support for specific issues you may have.

That help is linked to from the 2-minute Tour that each user is expected to have taken before asking their first question, and which states near the beginning:

This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum

I am sorry if the protocols of this site are not suiting your requirements but our volunteers are trying to answer as many as possible of the questions posted by nearly 50,000 users.

We wish we could spend more time helping to answer every question but to try and utilize the time volunteered here to maximum effect we are continually learning about the formats of questions we can do that for without burning out our potential answerers.

I hope you will continue to use the site and work with us to answer your and others' focussed GIS questions.

Answer 2

It's not about your personal feelings. It's about making a better site for anyone who has a similar question and wants an efficient, concise answer to their question. It's completely objective and thus the type of discussion atmosphere you are seeking just doesn't fit the profile of what SE does. I myself use this site almost daily and owe a lot of my professional development to it. I remember being "put off" on a few occasions with some of my early questions getting put on hold or closed due to me not fully understanding the nature of the site. To fully disclose the attitude of the site, which makes it better, even the use of comments like "thank you" and "please" are extraneous here and don't serve the intended purpose. Think of it as though we are all building a technical database together, full of concisely written questions and answers that are direct and efficient. You wouldn't find discussion in a technical document, not having it here is what sets this site aside from others.

Answer 3

I agree, the criteria for posting seems really vague, and I don't understand the reason mods put questions on hold or close them without explanation. If you think it's the question is vague or off topic, then I don't see the harm in leaving the question for someone else to answer, as you are under no obligation to answer the question. Seems really arbitrary and petty.