Meta-PokéBase Q&A
9 votes
1,022 views

The RMT is flooded with a bunch of unanswered teams right now, and while they don't break the rules, I think we should start to attack them. Perhaps impose the following rules on RMT?

Currently, there are about 100 pages of unanswered content, on a subpage that has a total 165 pages of posts, meaning roughly 40% of posts ever made actually get answered, and that's assuming it's not the user just adding content to their page because they overshot the character limit or if it's just a poor answer.

  • Unanswered Posts will be hidden after 30 days (or whatever acceptable time). to cut down on stagnant posts. There's nothing stopping you from reposting the same team. When a team is hidden for this reason, it will be pasted to the person's wall if they still need it. Exceptions go to posts with X amount of upvotes for others to try and build off of.
  • A person can have no more than X amount of unanswered posts at a time. Set whatever number you feel works well. Perhaps set a smaller amount for new users or something to cut down on people just here to make a team and expect it to be handled by every user on the site. I'm not completely as acquainted with the software this site uses, but I don't recall if the users can have posting restrictions set by number of questions.
  • We go through and hide unanswered posts from users that are no longer even active or from two+ years ago.
  • We make an exception for posts that have answers on them or have more than X amount of upvotes for the sake of point preservation and also since the "popular posts help users" argument doesn't need any of the other content if nobody is even looking at it.

If anyone has any suggestions/feedback, feel free to leave them below.

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Thank you for the claim with no reasoning.
Yep.

What is the point in doing this though? What does it resolve? It cuts the number of stuff down, but it isn't hurting anything. I like the idea, but I feel as if it doesn't solve anything, or that there is any real problem other than bad formatting and rule breaking over there.
I honestly really dislike it when people use the RMT to show off, but meh. I'm neutral on this. My instinct tells me Yay, but my prediction says Nay.
-For one, it draws more attention to individual teams as there will be fewer unresolved posts active.  I don't think I need to repeat the fact that there are about 100 pages of unasnwered content, including outdated generational teams, pokemon decks from the TCG, and so on. By having fewer unanswered posts, there's less of a chance for users looking at the unanswered section to go exploring with the older posts since there's less of it around, thus drawing more attention to the current posts and better ensuring that stuff actually gets looked at.

-At the moment, the majority of unanswered posts are in the three digit range for views, and that's usually over the span of 1-3 years, meaning that hardly anyone is actually looking at most of the unanswered posts. If they are looking, it's when they have a lot of upvotes, which I've already amended in the list.

-Setting a cap isn't more for the content itself, but rather to prevent floods of unanswered posts or from any new users trying to get their teams answered and nothing more. The site doesn't work optimally without both questions AND answers being posted. At the moment, you've got about a 40% chance of even getting any feedback, let alone good feedback.  Both main suggestions are to draw more attention to unanswered content so that it can be answered and still serve the same function it has before.

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Here here!

1 Answer

2 votes

I don't think it's a massive problem having unanswered questions there, but I feel like the best thing would be to answer all those old questions.

If anything we should be less "restrictive" and allow short answers which are currently discouraged. For example on this question Malachite has posted a long comment which would be perfectly fine as an answer - it has several suggestions.

The fact is, if no one has any suggestions for a team after several months then it's probably a good team, so maybe we can answer some of them with "this team is good".

What do you think?

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Dang iOS tapping. I love this.
"The fact is, if no one has any suggestions for a team after several months then it's probably a good team, so maybe we can answer some of them with "this team is good"."

There are few recent teams that I would answer saying "This is good"

Just my personal opinion, but encouraging the shorter answers seems like a good idea.
It seems a bit odd for people answering to get points for doing next to nothing though.
I agree with encouraging shorter answers if they still work. We now don't have to spend so long, and can answer more stuff now. The RMt answers shouldn't be as long as the actual RMT xD
Sure, don't post solely "this team is good" and nothing else. But there must be something that can be suggested for each one, even if it's something fairly minor.
When the forums get cooking are you thinking of converting the RMT to more of a forum based place so that we could just ditch points entirely?

This is in correlation to DT's comment.
@MrK yes when the forum eventually comes it will basically be an update to the RMT section, all the comments and answers are likely going to be converted to regular posts.
Awesome, that'll likely fit in really well with the short answer solution you answered with.