Suggest improvements to Ask LibO

English
#1

According to a recent announcement, we will have new system administrators soon. They will be appointed from the ranks of high-reputation users.

I thought I’d start this thread to collect suggestions on how to make Ask LibO better so that the new sysadmins / moderators will be able to get a running start. Here are a few suggestions:

  1. Allow new users to comment directly
    below the Answer to their Question.
    As of now, they are unable to do so
    because of low rep and so they use
    an Answer to their own Question to
    request clarification to an Answer
    given by someone else, which is
    stupid.
  2. Allow new users to upvote Answers to
    their Question immediately. Not
    every good Answer provides a solution so does not
    deserve to be Accepted, but it may
    deserve an upvote!
  3. Reduce rep required to edit
    community wiki from 750 to 100 or
    even lower. Keeping new contributors
    out via high barriers defeats the
    purpose of this website.
  4. Closing a question requires 2000
    rep. Much too high, reduce to 500 or
    less.

In general, make it so that using Ask LibO is not frustrating and infuriating to new users. At present, the site is not good enough.

#2

See also: AskLibO: How many “karma points” are required for …?

#7

A list of currently open (UNCONFIRMED, NEW, ASSIGNED, REOPENED, VERIFIED, NEEDINFO) bugs using the “ASKLIBREOFFICE” tag can be found here. Before raising a new bug / enhancement request, please check that list to see if the particular concern in question is listed.

By way of answer to the points listed by the OP, there does not appear to be (as I write this) any bug specifically dealing with the matter of karma or what types of actions are allowed on this site and by whom. This will always be a contentious issue for the reasons pointed out in the answer by @qubit1. My personal views toward the points raised are:

  1. Largely agree. Not sure what to do about the spam aspect.
  2. Probably disagree. It essentially takes time and contribution to become a member of any community. Instant karma is never a good thing.
  3. Disagree. The entire community wiki idea appears mal-adapted to a Q&A site to me. In the case of LO in particular the rapid pace of development means that specific questions and corresponding answers have a higher risk of becoming dated / inaccurate quite quickly.
  4. Disagree. I don’t say that simply because I am now north of the 2000 point mark. My viewpoint when I was south of this threshold was no different. The act of closing a question should be reserved to those who effectively moderate the site (whether an official moderator or otherwise). This is fairly typical practice IMO.
[Meta] Why does search from Q&A page return home page only?
#3

Hi @joe1234,

Hopefully the site is looking a bit better now :slight_smile:

I’m definitely open to suggestions on how to improve the site. We’re still working away on a backlog of questions, but we’ve made great strides on that front and I hope to reduce the crufty backlog even further.

Some quick comments on your suggestions:

  1. Allow new users to comment directly below the Answer to their Question. As of now, they are unable to do so because of low rep and so they use an Answer to their own Question to request clarification to an Answer given by someone else, which is stupid.

Yes, this limitation is not ideal. The problem is that we don’t want to give instant privs to users in case they start spamming everywhere.

One way to deal with this is to instant-upvote any question when the OP has < 3 karma and the question sounds reasonably coherent (i.e. no spam).

  1. Allow new users to upvote Answers to their Question immediately. Not every good Answer provides a solution so does not deserve to be Accepted, but it may deserve an upvote!

Yes, that could be helpful. But remember that upvotes translate into karma, and we’ve already had some SPAM issues where spammers would not only post SPAM in Questions, but would then use 2nd or 3rd accounts to post more spam in Answers to those Questions (very complicated, really!).

So for now, a karma hurdle can be helpful for SPAM prevention.

  1. Reduce rep required to edit community wiki from 750 to 100 or even lower. Keeping new contributors out via high barriers defeats the purpose of this website.

The ‘community wiki’ feature is just bizarre, and here’s why:

  1. Users need karma to gain additional rights on the website
  2. Marking Q’s or A’s as wiki-style means that the poster gets no karma

Unfortunately, #1 and #2 just aren’t in harmony…

  1. Closing a question requires 2000 rep. Much too high, reduce to 500 or less.

Are there any bugs in particular that you’d like to see closed? Please feel free to tag bugs with something like “needs-closing”, and put a comment on the bug like “CLOSEME: reason goes here…blah blah blah”. Most of our outstanding UNANSWERED bugs need more work than just closing, so please concentrate your efforts on providing answers

#4

And feel free to either ping me with @qubit1 here on the site, or wander over to #libreoffice-ask on IRC and ping me there :slight_smile:

#5

I just posted related a bug report
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62083

#6

fdo#62083

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

#8

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