I think that a new category of questions would be helpful. This new category would be for questions that, after a given length of time, (say a month or so) still have zero (0) replies.
Among the possible titles for this category could be:
(1) Unanswered Questions or
(2) Challenging Questions or
(3) Answering the Unanswerable or
(4) Can You Answer These?? or
Any other title you deem appropriate.
My personal response: Interesting. Not sure about the official response.
Not many questions make it through GQ without getting at least a partial answer. In the last week or so, there was one about Caribbean dog breeds (which for the life of me I can’t find now), but it’s often a month or more between such instances.
Zero helpful replies or zero replies of any sort? I asked about why I feel weather changes coming in the ankle I broke last winter, and a couple of people chimed in with “me too – why is that?” but we never got an actual response. (I limited myself to the traditional one bump.) I guess QtM was on vacation or soemthing.
We’ll discuss it, but my initial feeling is that we really don’t get enough of those unanswered questions to support an entire forum worth of them.
Besides, I think the choices you have now in where to place such a question actually make your chances of getting your query answered are better than having an isolated place where stuff just sits.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
This seems like a good idea to me. Maybe once a question has been through GQ without a useful response it could go to this new category and stay there until satisfactorily answered. Stuff like the origin of “the whole nine yards” could sit there waiting for an answer, hopefully keeping people from submitting the same unproven theories over and over again. In my case, I joined these boards to get an answer to a question about Chekhov in Feb. of 2003. I received no useful answer until June of 2004. So in some cases the teeming millions do eventually come through even without such a forum.
This sounds to me like an awful lot of extra work for the moderators. Such questions will not, by definition, be on the first few pages, so the mods are going to have to dig around in the archives to move them. They won’t even be able to filter through the software for “zero replies”, since that would miss the threads with nothing but “I wonder about that, too”. And then each of those individual threads would have to be moved, which is nontrivial (back when I was a mod, all board functions would stop entirely for about five minutes when a thread was being moved).
Maybe, other than bogging down moderators by having them sift through GQ looking for unanswered questions, we could make this a voluntary title tag. If someone doesn’t get a workable answer to their GQ, they can ask the question again after a suitable length of time with a reference to the fact that they weren’t successful before. For example:
“What the heck is that big yellow ball in the sky? (Previously unanswered question)”
“What the heck is that big yellow ball in the sky? (One more time)”