Meta-PokéBase Q&A
9 votes
1,021 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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[Insert obligatory /me approves post]
However, alot of the times older users like Mewderator etc. post a very good team that doesn't have an answer. Is there a point in hiding that o-o
Perhaps not in terms of the individual post, but i'm looking more at the bigger picture:
-There are over 100 pages of unanswered teams
-The odds of someone selecting that one question from the pool is highly improbable.
-Even if they do choose it, like you said, it's very solid, so it may be harder to get a quality answer.
-People generally tend to see the RMT less as a means to answering other posts and more as a way to improve their own teams.

To me, it's less that these posts are in any way problematic, it's more that they don't provide much to the community if nobody is viewing them beyond the initial surge of popularity.
like KoD said. if a post has gain like 2 or more upvotes, it stays. it woule be a shame if enoch's sky warriors dissapeared
Well, I like looking at good teams in RMT, and many of them dont have answers, since they are already good. I dont mind deleting teams without much thoughts though
DT, I like the idea and all but this seems like a ton of work for the mods. xD
I could get behind this. I think the "30 days with no activity" rule is a perfectly legitimate guideline, and I also feel Semp and Ninetales' comments only reinforce the misunderstanding for why we have RMT in the first place. :P

It's not a place for you to make a perfect team and put it on display for everyone to see. If you want feedback at all, it's usually best to post a sub-par team and ask for specific help in certain areas. I always thought it was supposed to be more like a help line, not a contest.
Unfortunately it has turned into a mixture of both.
I honestly don't know about the hiding thing. dr. dude is right with the 2 votes thing, if it is that good it should be left there as a way for people newer to the competitive scene to see some successful teams.
I feel like that if we go hiding all those posts, people will complain about it and it will just cause more drama on the site, which would suck because right now things are running smoothly. The way I'd do it is move them to a separate part of the RMT section just for those teams. Because then there would be no complaining, and there would still be a nice, clean main section with recent or high quality teams there for people to see. Another thing I's want is that the move to the separate section is delayed for 15 days if the RMT gets an answer. It lets people quickly access it and discuss the answer and continue to improve the team.
Just my opinion though. I just think hiding all of those posts is really not going to make any difference in the long run. Seriously, why does the unanswered list matter? Most teams get responses in the comments area anyway. Perhaps the way we fix this is to allow shorter things as answers. Not "Urteam iz good", because that is flattery, but quick, short things that gives maybe three or four suggestions that would be converted to comments right now. This would kill the unanswered list, and would mean the new users don't get "comment next time" every time they post on RMT.
But no matter what, the RMT section changes. It definitely needs to be improved.
Posts from over 3 years ago that are unanswered  are really outdated teams like "Gen IV NU team" I've seen from users that aren't even active anymore. I see no problem in hiding posts that are basically never going to see any interaction at this point.

Things are running smoothly, but at the moment, 100 pages of unanswered content is ridiculous when there are 165 pages of questions. That means about 40% of the posts are actually going to get an answer, and that assumes you're getting an acceptable answer.  

Moving to a different section will still just continue the same problem, that people are mostly interested in help for their own team and less on helping their own. That's why I think this can be helpful--it's supposed to put a cap  on how much unanswered content we'll have at a time to give more attention to individual posts instead of having a giant sea of content that won't get anything.  I'm sure we can come up with a better way of showing off teams if that's what we want to do, especially with a forum interface underway.
Some people answer their own question due to the character cap. Would theses be hidden as well because they have received no official answer?
I don't think there's as big a problem with those, mostly because it'd be really difficult to track them down anyway.
In some cases I hide and reshow a team if it hasn't had much activity anyways. I still think it's a good idea, however.
Pretty sure PM is against hiding unresolved posts. I'd say a team with 3 or less votes with no answers gets hidden. And I will take care of the people who write too much and add an answer.
To anyone concerned about good posts, I added in a new change to the hiding part.
I like the first and third ideas, not sure about the second. There seem to be a lot of experienced people on the site whose teams are good enough that no one can offer enough feedback to properly answer them, and if they hit the limit, some really good teams would have to be hidden so they can most more.
Then perhaps increase how many unanswered posts you can have by your number of points? I had that idea before, but I just didn't know how the idea of placing more importance on the points.

They might be good, but if left unchecked, we get the problem we have now of tons and tons of unanswered posts that never end up getting answered, then when more posts come in, they simply get left behind. we could have people still viewing them, but I think that having only 40% of posts ever getting answered, I think it's a bit excessive.
Honestly we shouldn't hide unresolved questions.
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.