@StefanLasiewski Not necessarily, since much (most?) of the active communities of those sites are not people that were SF users before the sites existed. No change on the policy of "overlap is ok," see here.

@Iain I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, but the point I'm making is that the common perception that the google hordes brought a tide of low quality questions is not supported by the actual data.

So for the feature request, are you thinking this will supplement or replace the current "descriptive close reasons plus comments" system for getting more information out of people? The main concern I'd have would be that getting those scorecards populated with good information would take a lot of effort on the part of the reviewers, and might not be the most rewarding way for them to spend their time on the site. On the mobile front, have you tried out the iOS/Android apps?

@MadHatter Sure, and more directly we can look at simply the percentage of questions closed - but my point is that those metrics can only be a a measure of whether the question was considered good by the community at the time it was created. It doesn't objectively measure whether it's the questions that have changed or our standards that have changed.

@TheCleaner Just so you know, when I saw this in the morning when I was about to post this, well, you beat me to it :)

@ewwhite Yeah, that's a fair point. I think easier access to systems is going to mean that'll continue to be an issue, and I think we can help to push those people in the right direction. It isn't happening everywhere, for sure - I just want us to make sure we're accepting of "both ways" instead of just the way we're used to. There's good we can do for the devops/cloud types.

@HopelessN00b The change I'm proposing is a relatively major change in the scope of the site, or at least how the community should be treating the scope of the site - it may not work out how I want it to work out, but I don't think it makes any sense to call it "same-old same-old" since it's definitely something that hasn't been tried here before.

@Wesley Fair enough - it's very hard to objectively measure if question quality has gone up or down, so I don't know. Maybe this is due to the cleanup load being spread among fewer people. In any case, this change doesn't purport to fix question quality directly - hopefully it'll be fixed indirectly by having the cleanup load shared better.

@MichaelHampton I like the rewrite. Maybe different language around reproducing it, since that can be exceedingly difficult in complex environments, but I'm not sure how else to word that succinctly.

@Iain If your outlook in regard to the site is this bleak, maybe a break is a good idea? I've always considered you an important part of this community and I'd hate to lose your knowledge and insight, but it seems like you're incredibly frustrated with the current situation.

@HopelessN00b Metaphors aside, the point I'm making is that any approach that banishes "too easy" questions like the one you're referencing is unsustainable. I think the direction you want this site to go in deals with the symptoms and not the real problems, and leads to an increasingly small and insular community.

I think the question volume and overall question quality has stayed largely the same, with a minor jump in poor questions. I think the ramp-up in question closure and downvotes since July is a reaction to a perceived increase in bad questions; since people heard we were getting more google traffic, they adjusted their perception of incoming questions to assume they were from the google hordes. Compare these graphs - if the google hordes brought the bad questions, as is the theory, why didn't the downvotes ramp up until long, long after the traffic spike?

@HopelessN00b That attitude is exactly why a change is needed, because the "automobile mechanic" in your example is really "anyone who doesn't fit an increasingly narrow definition of "professional". If you're going to declare that anyone who doesn't ask a perfect question on the first shot should be written off as not part of the target audience, the target audience quickly approaches 0. Which, I understand, is how some people would prefer it, but that's not a healthy direction for the community as a whole.

@Wesley I know that an increase in low quality questions is the perception, but I think it's just perception. If people are burned out they should take a break instead of just being angry, see the last paragraph here.

@Iain As I mentioned over here, this is something the community team asked me to look at several months ago; that's been in the works for a while.

@TheCleaner Yeah, there will need to be some housekeeping there to prevent confusion.

@ChrisS Sounds good to me - I'd like to let this one sit a bit longer first with the high-level before we get into those specifics.