Who on fluther hates it when their question is removed by moderators because it seems like a poll?

Since when do you own the site and set the rules? Have you been paying money for a minimum level of service here?

The mods make an honest effort to work with users to help refine questions that will be acceptable. Why not try that? Leave the whiney-wah-wah’s elsewhere.

@robmandu – I don’t own the site and set the rules, I’m just asking an open question asking for peoples opinions on the matter. and no, I haven’t and I don’t see your point.

Even though I respond to some of the poll-like questions they really have a lot less value than questions where there is opinion or discussion. Often the poll questions become a laundry-list of answers that don’t really mean much.

Please read the guidelines carefully. They weren’t written for the amusement of the community. A poll-like question is “pretty much” flawed by fluther standards.

There are other sites for pollls and starwars. Users’ opinions are welcome when asked for by mods or Gods.

Seems to me that the moderators just can’t win….....People either complain about the quality of the questions asked or complain when questions are removed.

http://www.fluther.com/disc/16501/what-kind-of-questions-would-you-like-to-see-on-fluther/
http://www.fluther.com/disc/16480/is-fluther-getting-old/
http://www.fluther.com/disc/16212/what-is-the-most-asked-question-on-fluther/
http://www.fluther.com/disc/13554/what-constitutes-a-great-fluther-question/
http://www.fluther.com/disc/11860/how-does-having-a-fluther-question-deleted-make-you-feel/
http://www.fluther.com/disc/9652/why-do-people-flag-questions-if-you-dont-like-them-dont/
http://www.fluther.com/disc/7817/how-do-we-fix-fluther/

Some of the mods are control freaks. What can you do. I disagree with this decision as well and think the poll questions add value.

I didn’t mod those questions, but the way I’ve answered this question in the past is that poll questions may be removed for one of two possible reasons. The first is that they are often very open-ended and don’t encourage discussion, which violates the guidelines. The second is that they don’t encourage people to be “ordinary experts,” which is part of the ideal behind the site.

Also, @nikipedia is totally talking about me. She’s right, I hate poll questions, but I still let the vast majority of them get through.

For your question about browsers, you should have phrased it like “Which browser do you recommend I get: Firefox or Safari? And what are your reasons?” . Now THAT question would not have been removed because it is considered an opinion/advice question and even though in a way you are polling people you are still encouraging more discussion than a simple answer of “I use Firefox!”. Instead of hating on the moderators, the trick is making your questions acceptable by fitting the guidelines.

i get tired of all the poll and “game” questions…feels too much like a plain ole forum to me.

As a moderator, I would like to add that not all poll questions are censored; usually the barometer leans in favor of the asker of the question if the question has good tags, and elicits a response that provides insight or information, other than a simple, simple one line answer.

In most cases, poll-type questions can be improved if they ask for further insight into the subject; sometimes, a simple “why or why not” may provide enough depth to the question that it becomes a high quality question.

As soundedfury and PnL (thanks!) indicated above, questions that are open-ended, and lack insightfulness, are generally moderated. So in summary:

-Detail in the poll-type question, that spurs thought or information sharing, and
-Good Tags.

As a postscript, I will add that often, users post polls that have already been asked, so please, use the search and filter functions when asking questions to make sure your poll is not a duplicate (e.g. “How old are you?” or “Where do you live?”).

Thanks!

To add fuel to the fire, I disagree with the idea that a poll question allows you to “tap the minds of people and find out their opinions on subjects.” It allows you to find out their tastes, but not opinions.

I feel that polls are often an important part of how this site works, most of the Q’s I have seen are basicly just poll answers with a discription of why they are saying this. I think it may be time to add poll like Q’s to Fluther.

Takeaway: Append “And what are your reasons?” to every Question.

You’ll note that sometimes the mods will leave a poll-type question up if the subsequent replies have produced a decent discussion.

You see @cage, you already said you want the discussion. You just gotta make sure to ask for it.

@robmandu “You’ll note that sometimes the mods will leave a poll-type question up if the subsequent replies have produced a decent discussion.”
Well this is probably why I asked this question. you see my question was taken down around 5 minutes after it was asked, and it had already racked up around 4 responses, so it was doing very well. The Starwars one was also only asked today!

Sadly, I think you say what we would all like, but sadly it’s not true.

@cage – but were those answers “decent discussion” or were they…“I like Firefox.” “Safari rocks.”?

Aboult 10 of my Q’s have been removed. One of witch was “what time is it were you live” I wanted to see what time of the day it was when ppl were fluthering, but it was removed. I think fluther mods often remove a Q with out even opening it and seeing how it is doing and what sort of responses it is getting.

@ccatron, I actually think that there was some decent discussion (@soundedfury replied there and summed up my perspective on it nicely.)

That said, it’s been discussed before… and recently.

So there truly was nothing novel lost.

@rob – ok, thanks.

I think soundedfury has hit the nail on the head for me when he said, “The second is that they don’t encourage people to be “ordinary experts,” which is part of the ideal behind the site”. For me, the idea of the site is to access knowledge that I don’t have or to impart some that someone else doesn’t have. Telling you my favorite star wars character does you no good unless you are trying to be my friend.

I know that the admins are working on things behind the scenes that will solve some of this problem. My guess is that the site became more social than they had originally anticipated, and so they are busy building more social components in. Bear with us while we grow.

@ccatron “Telling you my favorite star wars character does you no good unless you are trying to be my friend.”

Maybe you should tell that to the person who asked the question!
They asked it for their reasons, and it obviously will have done them some good, otherwise, what’s the point in asking in the first place!

Couldn’t all questions be considered “polls”? And to answer this one, I hate it when that happens!!!

True, I asked the Star Wars question because I wanted to know who people’s favorite character was. But to defend myself, I was going to lead it all into a philosophical debate about the force, midi-chlorians, and the underlying thematic truths of Star Wars.

Sheesh.

I personally will answer poll Qs I’m interested in. Polls are not irksome to me.

What is irksome to me is that, when a user is confronted with having a Q moderated, and they fully understand the reason why, they then feel this manic need to stage some sort of adolescent protest by posting multiple additional Qs that also are likely to need moderation for the same reason.

Look, if Fluther decides to actively support polls in the future, then great! Until then, get over yourself. Go build your own polling site if it’s so damn important.

But please, please stay here and participate, too. The Fluther mods are not out to get you. They are trying to improve the experience for everyone.

Personally, I believe you didn’t provide enough information in your question about Safari vs Firefox to make it meaningful.

There was plenty of information you could have included (your browsing habits, what version of Windows you are using, the spec of your computer), and people could have had a meaningful discussion about the increased performance demands of Safari over Firefox, web app support in the browsers, text rendering, plug-ins and much more.

These are things that actually would have helped you to make a decision, instead of a what was basically just a voting system. The way it stands, you were asking whether or not to wear brown or black shoes without telling us anything about the rest of the outfit.

I did my best to explain this to you when I pushed your question back to editing, but instead of adding anything about your question to your question, you appended a sentence on how annoyed you were that you had been asked to edit it.

This is the thing; when we remove a question, often all it requires is an extra bit of effort, a small chunk of information to make it that bit more meaningful, and people jump to believing that we hate what they were trying to achieve. This is not the case at all.

Your question was sound, but you needed to add more information to create a discussion that would actually help you to decide between the two browsers.

@cage – sorry, I didn’t mean to point it towards you, i was just giving an example. but do you seriously think there was a valid point in asking who my favorite star wars character is? it was a social-type question that can only help reveal the personalities of the fluther community. unless someone is conducting a serious study about star wars characters or is trying to have “a philisophical debate about star wars”, it is pointless to ask it in the fluther community.

@Babo: No, all questions are not polls. A poll question is one that blindly requests an ‘answer a’ or ‘answer b’, but a genuine question is one that is person and context specific, is information rich, and has a direction towards helping the asker to make an informed decision.

The reason to come and ask Fluther whether or not to use Safari or Firefox is because you have your own specific situation and cannot decide what would work best for you. If you don’t tell us more about your situation, you’re essentially just asking for a feature list of each browser (and hey, you can look at their websites for that). Beyond that, it’s only a popularity and voting contest between the browsers.

@ccatron, like I said. Ask the person who asked the question, therefore you’ll find out if they did have a valid point in finding out which of the StarWars characters is your favorite.

p.s. I didn’t take any offense :) (coz it wasn’t me lol)

@cage: If they did have a valid reason to open such a seemingly non-informative topic, then they should have elaborated when they asked. But I really don’t see how they would have hoped to learn anything with such a small sample.

small sample…? well in that case we may as well just boycott fluther all together since what your saying is that fluther is such a small sample, it was pointless in asking the question. Great stuff coming from a mod there :)

@cage: I don’t understand your argument? Asking 20 people what their eye colour is won’t really help you learn anything about the most popular eye colour (beyond the Fluther members who took the time to answer, anyway). Asking 20 people what the most ideal time of year to plant a bonsai tree is, on the other hand, will hopefully give you some informed and helpful information.

@cage, learn about sample size. It’s important. And for polling purposes, @richardhenry is right on.

look. I’m not gonna defend the guy who asked the StarWars question anymore, I’m just gonna say, I didn’t ask the question, and maybe we should ask him why he asked it and thought it was a valid question. He was the one getting something out of it, not me.

@cage, that’s what the moderation process is attempting to do. Did you check your email? Or even just follow the now defunct link to your question? The moderation is considered a process. It’s entirely possible your Q can be re-instated, especially if you follow the modest suggestions provided.

IOW, the moderation process is how Fluther mods ask you what you intend.

—
Some people are determined to deliberately misunderstand much of what they encounter in life. Sometimes I have a hard time realizing that that’s their problem, not mine.— Jason Kottke

@cage – we know you didn’t ask the question and we’re not asking you to defend it. it’s a great example of a poll question and you asked about poll questions. elchoopanebre has already claimed the question and fessed up that he just wanted to know which star wars characters people like.

We’re jogging in circles now. Let’s all learn and move on. Love you all.

< < hits the Stop Following link.

bottomline is some ppl. Simply don’t want to help others, this is where excuses arise i.e. Guidelines, rules & regulations and not to mention for for many ppl. Thinking and analyzing is ultimately too taxing for them and they push the help seekers away.

@iphone – uh…......what? which side are you on?

Sometimes the moderators are a tad sadistic. But what can you do? BTW, I like poll questions!

@ iphone – huh?

I actually don’t like when a question is phrased in such a way that it only generates lists of answers even though I have also made my own list answers.

I am much more informed and moved by reading about people’s experiences or knowledge.

@berocky1: Are we? Sadistic?

yes…. very

extremely sadistic. Big time

Once we know the color of many peoples/ eyes (choices being – 5, or to stretch things,6)-we have learned what? Why would removing that question be considered sadism? Personally, I’d call it TLC. (My eyes are hazel. Hope that makes your day.)

@ gail.

WTF?!

@berocky1
yeah I thought that

One of the recent poll questions related to eye color.

Simply put: It’s a Q&A site. Not a poll site. Sorry for your trouble, but it is what it is!

This was a poll question, not?

I agree. This is a simple poll question and should’ve been removed.