Should Server Fault stop accepting questions from unregistered users?

Question

If you've read the front page recently, you're well aware that there's a large percentage of total crap on it. Indeed, more than a third of the questions posted in the last 60 days have been closed or deleted. I'm led to believe this is quite a high number among Stack Exchange sites.

This post is about one possible way to reduce the number of of poor quality questions:

Remove the ability of unregistered users to ask questions.

This has been done for some time on SO, Programmers and probably some other sites, with varying outcomes.

A look at our recent statistics shows that 57% of questions posted by unregistered users are "bad" questions. And our resident statistician informs us that making this change could reduce our bad question rate by up to 13%.

But shouldn't we make it as easy as we can to ask questions?

It should be easy to ask a question, but my feeling has been for some time that it is much too easy to ask a question here. We're not meant to be a site which will Google the answers for you or write your configuration files line-by-line or walk you through the finer points of plugging in a network cable.

Requiring registration may discourage poor quality drive-by questions from people who won't even return to improve their question or accept an answer. For those who do register, it gives them a moment in which they may hopefully begin to KEEP CALM and WRITE A BETTER QUESTION. Ideally.

Is this all you've got? This won't have much of an effect.

No, this won't have a large effect on the rate of poor quality questions. But every little bit helps, and I have other ideas which I'll also be proposing in the days ahead.

Answer 1

Yes, you should have to register to ask on SF.

In addition to that, our registration page should have a subset of help/on-topic on it. Then there's no reasonable excuse for people to have no clue.

Answer 2

I don't think you should have to register to ask questions.

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Frankly the speed bump of registration (especially for the developer types, who probably already have a Stack Overflow account so they can code-by-clipboard for their day jobs) is barely a seam in the road.

I would much rather see an old-school copy-protection style shibboleth based on the about page for unregistered users ("According to https://serverfault.com/about what is the third type of question you should not ask on this site?") -- A correct answer being required in order to post your question.
At least they'd have to read it when they copy and paste it.

Answer 3

I think requiring registration could help to prevent fly-by questions but only if done like Voretaq said with a q&a for first time users of the site. There's that fine line though between being welcoming to potential long-term experts and keeping the riff-raff out.

Personally, I like the idea of requiring new accounts to be asked a few basic questions (and agreeing to them via checkmarks or T/F or whatever, before allowing their first question to be posted. These questions could be something like the following:

STOP! Before posting your first question you need to answer the following:

1. There are other SE sites about IT, so please make sure you are on the right one. Did you read the About page? Specifically the sections on what you can and cannot ask on this site?
2. We don't like fly-by questioners. Do you intend on accepting an answer to your question if it is valid?
3. SF doesn't like long discussions back and forth. Does your question make sense and does it have examples of what you've already researched or tried?

I also find the site interesting as of the last few years and wonder if others feel the same.

Personally I see a large void "in the middle" of the sysadmin q&a. Perhaps that's because Superuser, Unix, Engineering, and other "sister" sites exist within SE. What I mean is most of the questions seem to fall into the:

check out this crazy, obscure scenario only really relevant to me that Google and others have no answer for

OR omghi2u I am new to IT

OR the I'm from SO and know very little about sysadmin stuff, help! questions.

I don't see a lot of questions/answers that the community has deemed mega-upvote worthy in 2013 vs. years gone by. Has the industry simply matured?

It appears that only 5 of the top 250 "upvoted" questions are from this year, the rest from the past. Have we simply answered 99% of the most common "server admin" questions at this point and the current crop of questions is relegated to either crap, shopping, lack of search, or in currently rare cases legitimate questions that make even the experts here have to pause and think it through or even throw up our hands?

Are we the minority voice hoping to hold onto a site that should embody professionalism and expertise when the rest are wanting a dumping ground of mediocrity and "in case of emergency break glass for simple and quick online IT support", where we are relegated to being the "wise old sages in the Comms Room"?

Answer 4

No, I don't believe ServerFault should stop accepting questions from unregistered users, as I do not believe this will reduce the number of poor quality questions. what it will do is increase the number of abandoned accounts and increase the likely-hood of missing out on some "good" questions.

This post is about one possible way to reduce the number of of poor quality questions

I don't agree. There are already mechanisms in place to handle poor quality questions (votes, flags, etc).

Yes, this is after the fact and you are looking to prevent poor quality questions from being asked in the first place. However, I believe the best you can do is offer some information at the question asking stage (which is already being done) and hope the user cares enough to read it and adhere to it.

Unfortunately, many of these people who are asking these poor questions are real people with real deadlines on real projects who could care less about how clean the SF database is, or how "good" we think their question is. They are stuck. They have a question, and need an answer. If this request is implemented, they will create an account that they will probably forget about in 30 seconds. Then they will post their question. It may get down-voted into oblivion, closed, comment-spammed to hell and back. But they will probably just ask again, until either they find the solution for themselves, or someone posts something that helps them solve their problem.

Then they are gone. Probably never to return. Or maybe they do, and have to create an account so they can ask their new question. But they forgot their old account, or probably forgot they ever had an account, so now they create another account.

Repeat.

While I applaud your effort and wish this was something that could help, I think we're trying to solve a problem that can't be solved.

Answer 5

This isn't a bad idea, but... I'm skeptical that it'll do much of anything when it comes to decreasing the number of low-quality questions here. It certainly didn't do much for Progse.

As you say, every little bit helps, but in this case it could end up hurting almost as much as it helps.

IMHO, the best reason to turn this on is simply to reduce the amount of confusion and support that unregistered users tend to generate / require. That's not something to ignore - as one of the folks handling support requests, I certainly wouldn't mind seeing fewer of them - but it's also an issue that could be and maybe should be addressed in other ways; if nothing else, it's a separate discussion.

So I'm marking this "deferred" for the time being. Let's try something else first, and see what (if anything) happens as a result. We'll revisit this idea on down the road.

Answer 6

I am a LAN Admin that also handles help desk. I have very little time and truthfully, one of the reasons I have gravitated towards SF is the fact that I can ask a question quickly without logging in. Don't change your policy. I think, for the most part, the system is working well.