Would a "bump" feature be useful to fluther users?

I COMPLETELY AGREE!!!!!!!

I feel like my questions get ignored if I ask them while not many people are logged on and other people ask questions, pushing me to the bottom with a lot less than a fair chance.

Seems like there would be potential for abuse and it might be annoying to see the same thing over and over.

I think a better idea would be a section along the lines of “Still needs more answers” or something, where if a person feels their question hasn’t been answered all the way they hit the button and it gets put in this secondary list separate from the main page. Then people are bored can go in there and check it out.

I think something along those lines would work better.

I don’t know about a “bump” feature (sure, why not), but I’d totally advocate a “Community Recommends” tab on the front page. Mods choose a few questions that either:

A. Have a great topic or debate

B. Are great questions in themselves but lack substantive answers

or

C. Are dug from the past

Somethin’ like that.

I would like to see more of the bullshit questions vanish so good ones can stay on the frontpage for longer.

Oh, pardon me. I meant ”Collective Recommends”.

I can’t see a reason for bumping questions. If no one wants to answer it, no one wants to answer it. If you want to ask something similar, again, then ask it in such a way that it attracts answers. You don’t have to get rid of the old question.

I’m in the non-bump crowd. This will give any self promoters dominance over the front page. Then fluther will become a bump war.

@daloon :: It isn’t that people don’t want to answer questions. Sometimes (usually with computer questions) we simply can’t. I just really hate it when a legit and obscure question gets bumped off the frontpage for a “joke about fart” question.

Fluther is actually worthless to me when I need real help with a problem. Good questions vanish fast and most of the answers are jokes that don’t really help. So for help I go to ask.metafilter. This is just entertainment.

BLASPHEMY

@johnpowell I don’t get it. Don’t you get questions placed in your queue? All you have to do is click “remove” and you weed it down to the good ones rather easily.

Bump here Bump there Bump everywhere!

@daloon :: I kinda gave up on that.

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@johnpowell Oh. Well, you can always start fresh—deleting your question queue. Do you have something against that? I do it when I’ve been away on vacation or something like that. I can manage a queue of around 100, but after that, I dump them all. Also, I’m always pruning out the questions I’m following.

Now that I think about it, I think maybe you should hire someone just to prune out your activity.

I would not be interested in seeing this feature added. If people don’t respond, they don’t respond. Sometimes a question just doesn’t strike a chord, sometimes no one knows the answer, and sometimes it’s just going to be a couple of weeks before someone gets to it in their “Questions for You” list.

Try coming at your question another way, or with a different hook, or with more (or less) context. People who might be interested could have failed to pick it out. As others have just said, you can take another shot at it.

Make sure your subject line is specific enough to attract interested parties. Vague subjects are easy to miss.

POOR: What should I do about this?
GOOD: How do I drain a waterbed?

POOR: What does he mean by this?
GOOD: My boyfriend has changed his phone number and left town. Is this a message?

POOR: What do I do now?
GOOD: I washed my sweater in hot water and now it looks like doll clothes. Is there any way to get it back?

It gets tiresome enough to see popular questions repeated again and again. It would be even worse to see endless repeats of questions that didn’t catch on. But it’s no reflection on you—not every thought that pops into our heads is worth a big discussion! Let it go. It’s not a contest. If you are burning for a real answer (and not just a lot of comments and opinions), chances are there’s another way to come at it—or else it’s essentially factual and you can Google it.

I also feel that some questions are either too obscure, too repetitive or too banal to answer. I am skipping more and more answers mainly due to sadly predictable sexual innuendo, flirtatious chit chat, illiteracy, overwriting, and verbosity. And some folks seem to be paging routinely through Wikipedia in order to quote something and ask our opinion on whatever.

Now, if we stuck to Finnish, that would be a horse of another color.

What has been very helpful for me are cat issues, computer issues, dig. camera issues and food and health issues.

If you really want to bring a question back to the front page you can, simply by posting something on it. However, you can also ask it again but in a different way and possibly get more responses.

I know that I have asked some questions that didn’t get a lot of useful response, but that was mainly because the folks here haven’t had any experience with the situation. Everybody has had a relationship of some sort so those are easy to answer, but not everyone has experienced the same medical or philosophical problems.

?? @Darwin, is that correct? I thought questions appeared on the main page only in the order in which they were posted. Responses don’t boost a question back to the top, do they? I have never seen an old question go back to the top.

@Jeruba – Actually you may be right. My brain turned off momentarily.

Some bulletin board lists work that way, but I don’t think this one does.

Fluther doesn’t work like that. And that is a good thing. I would still like to see a button that lists questions without a Great Answer from the person that asked the question. Like a top twenty of questions without a resolution.

Edit :: this will help find questions without answers.

How about if the option only became active after a certain time period as well? I am not trying to turn this in to Digg or any of the other social news sites, I simply think there is a better way to nudge a question. If the main concern is rampant

Suggesting that a question doesn’t get answered simply because no one is interested in it is a) insulting, and b) presumes that this site is stagnant, not growing, and therefore no new users are joining. I don’t think this is true. Since new users are joining and contributing regularly, there may be new users that would have a good answer to these previously unanswered questions. If you review my old questions, you will see that I only ask serious questions that I actually need or want the answers to. Thus, my suggestion is coming from the angle of someone sincerely looking to see if anyone new has a suggestion or if there is any new info on a topic.

Maybe it needs to be a combo of questions that have received “Great Question” votes but which have not actually received any responses? Maybe there is another solution. However, there are several questions that I have not gotten responses to that it would be nice to re-inject into the collective.

How about an option for a user to delete an old question that never got answered? Make it just useful enough so that people who actually want to update a question can, but difficult enough that it won’t be super spam friendly. For instance, If you make a new post with the same subject as a post you previously posted, it will then prompt you to delete the previous post. This still requires manually posting the question, but makes it less likely that the conversation will fork and end up with duplicate response streams that mods have to join up later (if they even do that…?).

It just seems like not having any solution in place invites the type of duplicate posting that is usually frowned on here.

“new users are joining and contributing regularly” (freerangemonkey)
Does anyone actually know how many users Fluther has?

I like this idea.

i think if more people filled out their bios, fields of interest properly questions would be better shunted.

perhaps a “avoid” listing would be of benefit: terms, topics and/or tags that you wish NOT to see, or have shunted to you. and we could tag everyone who misspells something as “ungrammatical”.~

— You can search questions by keywords using the site search function.
— You can go see what questions a certain user has asked.
— You can click on the topic tags in any question to see other questions on the same topics.
— You can click the topic links in your own profile to see questions on those topics.
— You can use the filter-by-fluther feature (the reason you have a fluther) to see questions posted just by people in your fluther.

These are all ways to see existing questions posted over time, without perforce loading and reloading the same questions to the site’s main page when they are not getting enough traffic to suit one person. This leaves the prospective answerer in the driver’s seat instead of letting individual askers (who have each had their turn on the main page) decide what is going to be displayed to the whole world of users.

Many questions receive answers long after their original posting, so people do find them. You can verify this by rolling over the paragraph marker at the end of an answer posting to see when it was posted. I see responses, GA’s, GQ’s, and new activity on things that have been up there for months and months.

@Jeruba Good point(s).

i think ‘bumps’ would just be a pain in the ass. sounds like an invitation to endless self-promoting spam.

@ Jeruba I guess I just don’t see this site being actively mined by these so-called “prospective answerers” you mention who are apparently going back in the fluther archives to answer old questions. I would guess – and this is purely a guess – that the VAST majority of users are not going back in time so to speak to answer old questions but are starting fresh.

At any rate, point taken. I will simply manually repost my old questions that have not been answered yet. It seems like the wrong way to go about it, but appears to be the preferred method.

In my opinion, bumping an uninteresting question would be just that… bumping an uninteresting question! And unfortunately, if we had a bump feature, the good questions could be buried even deeper. Sorry, but I don’t see the need for that function here.

It is similar to resubmitting a D English paper to your professor and hoping he’ll raise your grade without a rewrite.

Ok, let me ask this. If used properly, would this be a good idea?

(sorry if I changed the question @freerangemonkey)

How in the world would you prevent abuse, competition, bump wars, etc.?

Any system that depends on everyone’s doing the right thing all the time is doomed to fail.

But even if it were possible to ensure that no one misused it, I simply see no necessity. There is no definable problem that such a change would fix, and it could create problems that we’d then need more rules and enforcers to correct. And the more we complicate things around here, the more cumbersome and less intuitive the site becomes.

@Jeruba I agree. Great answer!