Should you get some Lurve for asking a question nobody can answer?

I cant answer this. Wait, is that an answer?

Ha! Great answer—er, not answer.

Is that kind of like a vampire earning some complimentary blood because he didn’t bite anyone for several weeks?

But what if the apocalypse hits and you’re one of the only people left on earth?
Then it wouldn’t be our faults.

Well, sometimes it might be the case that someone can answer, but they choose not to.

I can write ten of those in 10 minutes. I’ll soon be the first to hit 30k if we do that.

Fluther isn’t Stump the Panel. The goal here is to have a database of answers, not to have a database of questions no one can answer.
And let’s say you ask a question no one answers. After 2 months, you get points?
What if someone then answers your question? Should you lose points?

People can answer any question- it just might not be a good answer.

If I feel it’s a good question I’ll give if lurve regardless if I, or anyone else, can provide an answer or not. I don’t think it should get lurve otherwise.

Give me a few minutes to search Wiki…be right back.

“I’ve bought a ClickyThing 2000 webcam from Obscurocom, but it gives me a d3n53-t0553r error. What should I do?”

“Does anyone know any good professional chimney cleaners around Incognitown, Antarctica?”

“How do I rewrite the source code of Fedora 9.23 so my computer can run on steam?”

“Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?”

Hello there, lurve points.

@Fyrius Alright, point taken. :-)

But I wasn’t asking this just to be silly. I actually asked a “very legitimate, answerable“http://www.fluther.com/disc/76326/how-can-electrical-power-lines-keep-burning-even-after-the-wire/ question today, but it looks as if nobody may know an answer to it. I know full well it has an answer, because it is asking for the physics behind a phenomena which I observed happening with my own eyes. I wasn’t thinking of frivalous questions.

GQ points area awarded by people who think a question is great, not contingent upon answers. So this could happen and probably has. But I agree with others that giving incentive to writing unanswerable questions is completely inconsistent with the purpose of this site (although I don’t think compiling a database is the purpose either).

@Fyrius, post your fourth question and I’ll GQ it just out of sheer admiration.

@Jeruba
I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been posted yet.
[Checking…]
Well, I’ll be buggered, it hasn’t. It’s only been posted as a reply by Grisaille.
Either that or the frustration tool that masquerades as our search tool is pulling my leg again.

To give credit where credit is due, I didn’t come up with that particular load of gibberish. It’s due to Anonymous, I believe on 4chan’s /v/. It’s become quite a famous non-phrase in those circles.

Which is to say it’s about time someone polluted the Fluther database with it, if only for its stupid meme joke value. Hang on.

There, that’s more like it.

And now it’s gone again. The incoherence seems to have overloaded the prefrontal cortex of an innocent passer-by mod to a point where their brain actually took it seriously and modded it for being too hard to understand, and so the question has effectively obfuscated itself out of existence. Interesting result.
Perhaps it had been posted before after all.

You posted it and it got vaporized? Too bad I missed it. I was out this afternoon. Well, I’ll GA you anyway for trying.

What? When I ask a question no one can answer, I feel like I’ve done something wrong. People who ask questions like that should loose lurve, not be rewarded.

@YARNLADY I suppose so if the questioner is deliberately trying to ask something unanswerable or ridiculously obscure. I don’t think my question about the wires on fire fell into that category, though. It was a legitimate question I have wondered about for many years.n It definitely does have an answer. And someone with a decent knowledge of electrical engineering and electric power transmission can answer it.

Ah, good point. I have asked a question on several other Q & A sites that is so specialized that only a few people would be able to answer it, and none of them ever saw it.

@ETpro
No offence, but at least by my standards that question fell into another category of questions doomed to loneliness, namely the category of TL;DR.
We’re a bunch of lazy attention-deficient tossers here on the internet, and any text larger than a convenient bite-size chunk is too much of a bother to digest unless it fascinates us from word one. Attention is a rare and precious resource these days, and if you’re bent on getting any, conciseness is your best friend.

@Fyrius You may be right. I tried to capture the excitement and terror of that day in the writeup for just that reason, but I guess I’ve got a way to go to get my Steven King badge. I couldn’t think of any way to shorten the writeup and still get across what happened in enough detail that someone so disposed could answer.

I’ll just have to hope some engineering genius with a penchant for reading stumbles across it.

Why does this sound familiar? oh yea….

@Axemusica Further establishing that the search tool to find duplicate questions is just there to frustrate us. :-)

@ETpro I know, it’s almost the exact same title. So you did in fact search it? haha, geeeez.

@Axemusica De rigueur before I post a question.