New User wizard

Question

So, looks like Ask Ubuntu have a similar problem to what we have - they often have a poor quality questions. I like what their moderator has done up as a proof of concept; a wizard that helps you ask your question:

I realise the best thing for this site is to attract a better audience and thus get people who are better at communicating by default, but if that fails, how do you feel about something like this? Obviously customised for Server Fault, and would need to be officially sanctioned by SE and enabled for users of a certain ilk. Or perhaps even as a "lolz I dnt knw wht im doing plz to send teh codes!" button?

What it does is ask you to copy/pasta certain debug info from your machine into a box, which determines some information about your system and most importantly gets you to post relevant information in your question about your problem.

I don't think this exact model will work for us, but I would love to see something like eBay does, where when you make a new listing they force you to type in a few words about your item, and then locate that category. If we could make them type in a few words (which could then perhaps be tags?) and it does a search and presents the top 3 questions with "Are you asking this?". And most importantly "Hey, listen, your question is going to down like a stinky turd left in a public toilet because [you're asking about RPI]. How about you try on the [RPI] site instead?" (with a "No, I like annoying people on the internet, let me ask my question anyway" button)

Answer 1

Author of the script here.

What it does is ask you to copy/pasta certain debug info from your machine into a box, which determines some information about your system and most importantly gets you to post relevant information in your question about your problem.

That's a little too simplified, it's actually a lot more flexible than all that. The idea is to essentially replicate the diagnostic process that users would usually go through for the problems that happen most (or need most hand holding) with the aim questions like "My internet is broken! How do I fix it?!" are answered before they're even asked.

It does this by asking questions, asking for hardware (and then looking for questions based on that hardware), suggesting manually-selected popular questions (if you have a networking troubleshooting mega-question, for example) and asking for the output of commands which can often be essential in manually diagnosing things.

So even if something does get to become a question, if it comes through this, you can make sure it has the all the relevant data and tags from the start.