Unanswered Questions

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey SEOMoz

I have been spending a bit of time in the Q&A of late and have noticed lots of questions never get answered. I also had a question of my own that I left open for ages and I figured it maybe a good idea to add some kind of email nag or on screen notification for people to close old questions.

There are some that have had plenty of answers but that either never get closed & really, it takes away from the fun of participating if things are never closed off & searching shows the same old tired, answerd but not closed questions lingering around like a bad smell.

Not really a question, but a little tweak suggestion.

Cheers
Marcus

[MarieHaynes]

An email probably wouldn't work for me.  But, perhaps an extra Moz point for marking your question as answered would help?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, yeah, I think that's a good idea but maybe a combination of emails with links to the posts, on screen nags, points & auto closures on real old questions would help keep it tidy.

[AaronSchinke]

Maybe auto close the question after 30 days? The community is pretty active and if it isn't answered within 30 days it's probably not going to get answered (or marked as answered)?

[Marcus_Miller]

Yep, I agree, I think we need the following - email nag - on screen nag - auto close thirty days after last response That should do it I reckon.

[RyanPurkey]

It also would be nice to see a categorization feature by answer.  For example, I recently answered a question regarding 301 redirection and www vs non-www (http://www.seomoz.org/q/hostname-report-in-google-analytics) where the bulk of my answer was pulled from the SEOmoz "learn-seo" section.  That quoted answer could suffice for multiple questions so if someone has a nuanced situation they could scan through a block of questions that all have one answer and likely find what they need, sort of like a FAQ with links to all the questions that fall under that one answer.  Or perhaps a wiki format with links to all the questions that it answers.

[KeriMorgret]

Thanks for all of the suggestions everyone! We're aware that there are old questions that tend to linger, and we're working on some solutions.

Dunamis, why wouldn't an email work for you? I had thought an email might be one of the more effective ways of letting people know there had been answers to their questions, so I'd like to hear why it wouldn't work for some people.

Some of the people who asked questions were in a trial membership, and are now basic members, so they can't mark something as answered. I am either marking those as answered, or a discussion question. I'm also leaving notes on questions asking people if this has answered their question, but not everyone is subscribed to their own questions by email, especially on the older questions. When Q&A first launched, it wasn't as active, so my hypothesis is that people didn't get a response right away and didn't sign up for email notifications, then just stopped checking for answers.