It's chemistry soup

@Mithoron Isn't it even worse that I am not able to understand a question like that? I think it is at least missing some of the details to actually run the calculation. Apart from that I don't see the point. And just saying "you made no effort" is not helping anyone.

Hello!

@Martin-マーチン The last sentence of your meta post stopped me from commenting...

um. okay.

Thanks for writing that though

hm. We'll see how it's impacting things. I have my doubts.

I will try to write something.. soon... but I also don't want to answer too early, it would be nice to see what other people think.

Hmm?

Yes. Some others saying something would be great.

I am not sure the post is reaching those, who do the majority of the closing.

There will probably be lots of "show me the effort" closing still.

What du you think about effort? Or: The road to a new closing policy.

I'm still optimistic about that, I think that eventually people will figure out to downvote instead of VTC.

Yeah eventually...

@Mithoron yes, and -4 hides the question anyway - honestly if we want to "get rid" of bad questions from the front page, the best way is to downvote, not close. Historically if things get closehammered, nobody downvotes it, probably because it seems like it's "already been dealt with". And then you just have a front page full of "HALP ME calculate stoichiometry [on hold]".

@pentavalentcarbon @Buttonwood They have changed their username:

:D

@orthocresol can you explain that answer of flpf to me? I don't get his point.

Hm, my point is: You're trying to get those people to write better questions. I don't think those people are approachable trough direct communication. So you need to go indirect ways

@Fl.pf. No I don't want that

I want to only keep conceptualised questions

But wouldn't the best way to keep only conceptualized questions to just don't have the others in the first place?

@Fl.pf. and how would you achieve this?

1. Try to only advertise this site to "the right audience" (very difficult and kind of elitist/arrogant)
2. Close-and-forget the zero-effort questions
3. Implement hurdles for asking questions (very bad idea imho)
4. Stick with trying to be nice and get the OP to add effort and get more frustrated every day
5. Try your model

to 1. You try to change the community to an audience that is only interested in those question, get a gated-community

yeah, that's not going to happen

to 2. penalize zero-effort-questions and make them invisible fast so maybe people learn over time

well, that's the whole point of the post

to 3. force people to have a good answer first, maybe they then know how to ask

We have no mechanism to close these questions

I thought we do?

If you rename the "homework" close reason to "zero-effort"?

I just don't think it's a good way

because it doesn't change the situation, it just masks it

I am saying that effort is the worst kind of metric possible

I think we are talking about completely different things here.

your 1 and 3 would be things that needed to be implemented at the network wide level, so that's not going to happen.

your 2 would be: Just do it the same way we have done it the last couple of years

I am not trying to use effort as a metric either

Then what do you use?

relevance?

sorry, but i don't understand

Hm I see :) I think we're kind of out-of-phase

let me think a bit, I will probably edit my post later or tomorrow to make my point clearer

All I want is instead of saying: "We are not a homework service. Show us what your effort is and we reconsider answering your question." That's what we were doing according to the (currently still in effect) homework policy. I rather want to close such questions with a more objective reason: "Ask a conceptual question."

and btw. we're down from closing about 50% of questions to just 33%. To be honest 10% of copy/paste questions doesn't seem much, wait until the high traffic times come, typically around october/november...

Ok I understand now better what your goal is

My point still is that I think it's only sugar-coating a problem and not solving it. And I would still try to change how the site works as a community rather than using a closing-policy to enforce good-quality questions

no matter what the metric for "good question" is

And since apparently a big chunk of closed questions are at the moment categorized as zero-effort, you have to take that into account since it's apparently a good amount of the problem

There is no doubt that there will always be very low quality questions. There will never, ever be any restriction on the site to prevent anybody from asking questions. Never, ever! That is a network wide policy, that's just the way it is. And the more popular the site becomes, the more terrible questions you will get. There is no way to prevent this.

The question therefore becomes what to do once those questions are here. The easiest way to deal with them is just to down-vote and move on. Once a question hits -4, it is hidden from the homepage, and deleted by the scripts later (30 days).

Closed questions, without answers etc. get deleted faster.

I wouldn't want to put restrictions on asking questions either. I just think that just down-voting and closing bad quality questions doesn't help in making this a better site (which should always be the goal, to make the site better for everybody involved). Also, voting questions into the nirvana is kind of censoring also...

How?

You cannot solve this problem

thats kind of fatalistic...

@Fl.pf. Why do you think are we struggling with the homework policy over two years now?

Because it's an extremely difficult topic that doesn't have an easy answer?

Yeah, whatever. I'm sorry, I'm too tired to do this.

Guys?

I think I found a sock.

@Martin-マーチン Are you around? There's a matter here.

Ahh @Jan hello

Hi @Pritt o/

I have found a sock! @Jan and I need to inform a mod!

That’s nice, but I’m not a mod and I’m not closer to any mods than you are rn ;D

But you can custom-flag the post for mod attention and use the message to explain the problem.

Ahh, I will try that, thanks @Jan

@Martin-マーチン The preferred name is pyrrol-1-ide.

Hi @Loong o/

@Jan hi

Always good to know that things are still as they always were; Loong giving us nomenclature ^__^

How’s Finland?

bright all day, close to Midsummer

Hmm, I just realised: Check out people reached; especially @Loong :D

sigh

I’ve been waiting all this time to finally reach out to 1 metre of people! \o/

That may be the most conspicuous sock I've ever seen

@Buttonwood, sorry for the slow reply. Im not sure I know of a book about Mannich reactions, but the books by Stuart Warren (Disconnection Approach, and Strategy & Control) have a lot of carbonyl chemistry in them

chemistry.stackexchange.com/help/badges/104/organic-chemistry

A golden day \o/

Give me something to dupehammer like rn! =D

OK anybody, what the hell is a sock? I think I get it from the context of @PrittBalagopal 's post, but "sock"? Where'd that term come from?

A sock, short for sock puppet is a second account the same user owns and who he interacts with. Think of a puppet player with a sock puppet on his hand talking to it (being a ventriloquist, that is).

woo! @jan

Ah, I get it. And congrats on your new superpowers ;)

Mart, Ortho, Long, Jonsca and Manish beware: Here comes Superpower-Jan! ;D

I'm still trying to get to silver

Matched (and exceeded) only by Ron and Klaus!

Yeah, I've got a ways to go before I get to that level