Pokemaster: Regarding technical questions and hyperspecific questions.

Question

Would we like to allow super specific questions like How many times has team rocket blasted off or ones that would require deeper knowledge of the game's programming (which most people won't have access to) like IVs of unique trainers or do we want to take a middle route of hiding or something after a certain period of time?

We've had some posts unanswered for over a year, several pushing a year, and I think it can come down to some of this being really inaccessible information.

I'd personally think it better to hide these, but I won't touch anything without a green light first.

Comments

I'm pretty sure something to this effect was asked or stated a while ago, but I can't find the specific thread. The answer was to basically hide them after a while as 9/10 times there's no way they can be reasonably be expected to be answered. Of course since I don't have the actual thread then you'd probably want to wait for a more official response, but just thought I'd mention.

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Nice, been meaning to address this also. I’d actually jump right into discussing where the line would be drawn, since that’s the harder part of the issue in my opinion. Maybe we just keep things intentionally vague.
There’s also the argument it doesn’t matter if we have perpetually unanswered questions, which I’ll take as well.

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I personally think it's okay to let some deeper knowledge questions through, but it really depends on for what purpose, but nothing like the example DT gave (simply because it's also awfully specific and doesn't really have a purpose?).

But yeah, like Fizz said, where is the line? I don't think it's healthy having perpetually unanswered questions that quite reasonably can't be answered. I'd hide after a certain amount of time =/

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I think it can be a "use your better judgement" thing. Asking something like "how many dusk stones can I get in Ultra moon" has a use because you have a practical way to apply that knowledge for a specific question."

Asking like "how many pokemon have two vowels in their name" is still specific but there's nothing beyond trivia that can be obtained from that, so that's what I think the basis should be.

Likewise anything that would require intimate knowledge of the game's programming wouldn't be realistic for 99% of the pokemon fanbase to answer.

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With pointless annoying trivia then there isn't much use to have it around and I wouldn't mind being rid of it, but with a technical example I'd personally allow it. Although its highly unlikely that someone would be able to answer, it's still possible, and useful if it is answered. Leaving it open for the small chance that someone would be able to actually answer it in the future would be beneficial, even if the chance of it happening is unlikely. The annoying trivia questions have no real benefit to them even if they are answered.

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I wouldn't really care if you guys hid questions requiring someone to look at every TV episode and count how many times Team Rocket blasted off in each one. But I think questions about games, like "What's the largest area?", are different because they can be answered by dataminers or whatever they're called. Sure, 99.9% of everyone would have no idea how to do it, but if we just got one dataminer to pay those questions a little bit of attention then we can get an answer.

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Those style of questions would be fine if there were actually a few dataminers on the database. The majority of the userbase here is on the younger side, and most lack any technical knowledge regarding the code. However, some of these questions are helpful. For example, if a user asks for the chances of an a Pokemon joining your team in Pokemon Rumble World, that answer would be useful. Nobody can really use the largest area in the game for any practical purpose.

Hyperspecific and trivia questions do pose an issue, but the larger issue at hand is the fact that some users (you know you are) will deliberately ask questions for the sole purpose of trumping users who attempt to answer them. This as a whole defeats the primary purpose of Pokebase. Of course, if the line is too strict, we end up with a bunch of questions that are a simple Google search away.

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Small bump on this post; because I feel like this issue needs to have a ruling.  Specific questions like;
https://pokemondb.net/pokebase/308653/what-is-the-percentage-chance-getting-each-item-poke-pelago w
and other largely useless ones have popped up. I don't think the line 'curiosity' is anything near enough a good reason to keep a lot of these questions up.

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Is there a purpose in taking them down, though?

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I'm going to repeat Mew's point;
"but the larger issue at hand is the fact that some users (you know you are) will deliberately ask questions for the sole purpose of trumping users who attempt to answer them. This as a whole defeats the primary purpose of Pokebase."
In addition, there are a select few users who make up many of these questions, and appear to have this mentality. This is a Q&A ultimately. Not a way to stoke ego/post pointedly useless and relatively unanswerable questions.

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The more polite version is that we're here to offer information that's actually useful, not obscure and otherwise useless trivia. Occasionally we'll humour people but questions that don't serve a purpose aren't the most helpful to keep around.

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Bumping, we still don't have an answer.

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agreed, cant believe stupid hypertrivial questions like this get up to 7 upvotes https://pokemondb.net/pokebase/211715/how-many-pokemon-learn-a-move-at-level-69

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Asking such questions is just rude in my opinion, but there should probably be some rule against them if we don't want questions that stay unanswered forever.

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Too be fair, the rules do say not to ask trivial (as in LITTLE VALUE OR IMPORTANCE) questions. I say just trash em!

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That is a really good point, but the rest of that rule seems to define "trivial questions" as questions that can easily be looked up on this site.

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Honestly feel like if I were PM and I were asked this I'd be annoyed. Didn't he make people mod to run the place? Do yall really have to ask him what to do or are yall seriously just not allowed to make a judgement call on these tard questions? But I get why there's asking for clarification <:I

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No question has been unanswered for more than 1/4 of this site's lifetime. We've definitely gotten a bunch of equally unanswerable questions a long time ago, and they were all answered. So are these questions really unanswerable?
Of course, please correct me if someone hid all the really old unanswered questions.

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Pokemaster may have put up moderators to help keep up the quality of the site, but at the end of the day it's his site. I don't feel right just hiding masses of questions on just my opinion alone especially because what I think and feel might be different from that of other moderators/editors/etc. It's not really that we're incapable of making judgment calls (since I would have acted already if so), but because we want to be consistent in what we do so we're not giving people conflicting information regarding the rules.

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@DT yea i get THAT part, i just figured if you had a question as terrible as that IV one that sumwun posted you would just go ahead and trash it.

@sumwun I feel like this whole wave of super unanswerable questions is a pretty new thing to the site. I remember after XY came out there were only 2 questions on the unanswered list for like a year and they were "What is the chance of finding a Pokemon with a HA in a wild horde battle" and "what determines friend safaris" which are both questions with actually usable information. now theres like 35 unanswered questions and theyre all just dumb, the quality of pokebase has really DIPPED

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The quality isn't objective, is the problem. 'Annoying' is subjective, and the questions are not low quality (via the way auth normally judge it, terrible s&g, difficult to understand, easily looked up etc). They do not break the rules in any way and thus we do not have any precedence to hide them. You thinking that the mentioned question is 'terrible' is your opinion. An opinion shared by many, granted, but opinion nonetheless.

The content doesn't break rules in any way so there's no actual reason to hide them other than 'their annoying'. If I were to hide things because they were annoying, huge chunks of the site would be gone lmao.

'Pokemaster may have put up moderators to help keep up the quality of the site, but at the end of the day it's his site. I don't feel right just hiding masses of questions on just my opinion alone especially because what I think and feel might be different from that of other moderators/editors/etc.'

This is just it. Its PMs site and we don't want to go around hiding stuff on our whims.

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I can agree that one moderator shouldn't hide those questions entirely based on his own opinion. But if there appears to be a general consensus between moderators and editors that such questions should be hidden, I see nothing wrong with hiding them without PM's permission. Whether those questions are hidden or not isn't that big of a deal that he has to be directly involved.

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And as melcakes mentioned, the rules already say "Avoid trivial questions". The team rocket one should be considered a trivial question.

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Trivial refers to trivial to find the answer to on the website, not as in actual trivia.