scottberkun

One thing I’ve tried way back when I did forum support for IE, was to get the other forum watchers to agree to a simple policy. If any of us saw posts that didn’t 1) ask a well formed question 2) refer to some attempt to search for it 3) mention looking over the FAQ, we’d point the poster, in the friendliest way possible, to a one page sheet that listed how to do those 3 things.

This wasn’t too much to ask and it balanced out the 30 second to 30 minute tradeoff Beel points out.

Just noticed one more thing: the UI is latest first, not most frequent first. If you want to take a dent out of repeat questions the UI should be using frequency in some way.

Not sure there’s a fix for people being lazy (sadly). Do you guys have stats on how often the hot tags get clicked? My guess is that the less savvy a person is, the less likely they are to comprehend that UI. Putting it at the top isn’t going to benefit people with basic questions.

A “Before you ask a question click here” or, as oumba96 suggested, a compilation of the top 10 frequent questions, would be a better use for that top slot of UI.