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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on How are we supposed to give feedback for poor questions if such comments are deleted?

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How are we supposed to give feedback for poor questions if such comments are deleted?

+6
−1

The question https://software.codidact.com/posts/281517 is currently voted at -3. I wrote several comments to explain why, so the author can hopefully ask better questions in the future.

This morning, I found all but the first of these comments deleted without warning.

Alexei gave the following reason:

I have removed the comments that are not relevant. Please use comments to ask for clarifications or generally speaking, to improve the question.

Taken literally, this means that we are not allowed to tell people why a question is downvoted, because that's neither a clarification, nor intended to improve this question.

How are people supposed to learn how to ask better questions if we are not allowed to give them feedback?

Also, I spent quite a bit of time writing these comments, which is now wasted. If you disagree with my comments, could you ask me about them before deleting them?

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General comments (6 comments)
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+4
−3

Providing feedback can be done using comments. However, these comments are supposed to add constructive criticism and/or links to relevant resources. Your first comment does exactly this and it is a useful one.

However, the subsequent comments seem to be a debate around available Wikipedia translations and how an answer would look like, rather than suggesting how to improve the question.

Never-ending streams of comments are not particularly useful. If you find the question not useful and your comment does not lead to improving it, you can just downvote and move on.

If the question is off-topic, it can be flagged to be closed.

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General comments (4 comments)
General comments
meriton‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

So if I find a question unsalvagable, I should "downvote and move on" or flag it. So, I should never give negative feedback myself, and ask you to pass it along instead? Ok. Could you please pass along that googling and reading wikipedia before asking a question is not optional, even if English is not one's native language?

Alexei‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

@meriton This is not what I have said. What I have said is that feedback (regardless of being negative or not) should be constructive. Your first comment provides such feedback by suggesting in a nice way to check a reference before asking the question, because it seems that the information is easy to find. That is why that comment is still there.

Alexei‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

@meriton However, your second comment mostly deals with the poster's asking style rather than the post itself. I hope that I am clearer now. Normally, I would have moved the comments to a separate chat (comments are not meant for long conversations between users), but this option is not available here.

FoggyFinder‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

However, the subsequent comments seem to be a debate around available Wikipedia translations and how an answer would look like, rather than suggesting how to improve the question And who said it's forbidden? What's the point to have a comment section if you can't actually write there ?