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We all love Tridion Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.

The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.

Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

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Amongst the panel of questions for the self-evaluation review, I have observed the following trends:

  • There are many questions that are simply poorly written insofar as they either a) do not clearly communicate what the person is trying to achieve or b) do not explain what they need the community to help with (or the specific outcome they expect from asking the question), or both. Often, the asker does not illuminate for us what they have already tried.
  • A lot of the questions are about configuration issues with Tridion (and related modules) (which somewhat validates my long running gripe about the official documentation)
  • Many of the questions do not have accepted answers. Is there a mechanism for the mods to ping a user to review and accept an answer to their question?

Generally (inclusive of both the review questions and more broadly on the Tridion Stack Exchange site), I have also observed that:

  • A considerable number of questions are really asking for suggestions or solutions for specific use cases, rather than asking for help with a particular aspect of implementing said solution (while often not explaining whether the asker had tried (or bothered to try) any approaches themselves). Would it be possible to have a separate list for these types of question?
  • We are continuing to get a lot of .NET (and Java) questions, which, while ostensibly about Tridion, could perhaps be more appropriately answered in another Stack Exchange location, e.g. Stack Overflow.
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    About all we can do to get a user to review an accept an answer is to leave a comment for them on their question.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Aug 12, 2014 at 16:08
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In addition to the other answers, I agree that some of the questions lately have been of quite poor quality.

I think as Glenn says we should be pushing users to learn good habits more with comments and closes/down votes. However, it's a fine line between punishing the lazy and discouraging the beginners.

Maybe some more active editing of questions would help as well?

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In addition to the items Tristan has identified, when I went through the batch of questions included in this review I noticed a several of them (4 out of the 10 if I recall correctly) were questions that had answers easily obtainable elsewhere. This leads me to question how much research the OP of those questions actually did prior to posting the questions.

I'm not sure what the action item here would be other then to prompt the askers to show their attempts at resolving the issue.

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Final Results

Net Score: 7 (Excellent: 8, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 1)

Net Score: 6 (Excellent: 8, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 2)

Net Score: 5 (Excellent: 9, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 4)

Net Score: 4 (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 7, Needs Improvement: 2)

Net Score: 4 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 11, Needs Improvement: 0)

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 8, Needs Improvement: 3)

Net Score: -1 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 5)

Net Score: -2 (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 8)

Net Score: -2 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 6)

Net Score: -3 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 6)

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I think the overall value and quality of the site is still very good.

But, I agree that recently some simple questions and also asking without giving the full context and sample code is watering down the quality of the site. I think shutting down questions is the right way to go, as well as pointing new users to good questions and letting them know in the comments what we expect when someone asks a question.

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