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My idea is to create a dialog window or whatever, with couple of remarks for users asking their first question, poping up just before posting.

Edit: Folowing paragraph is about few things I want to specify after Mr. Wizard's suggestions:

I want to stress that I only want to ask about non agressive/annoying popup window or similar idea, I'm definitely against forcing anyone to anything. Also, form of the statemets in such window does not have to be short and colloquial like below, those are only examples. Polite and extended form is also what should do the job.

First of all:

  • Do not accept today!

Let's be honest, if someone is new and is in hurry than he/she is not going to read About page etc.

And I'm tired of "please do not accept, someone will show something better. do not discourage others". I agree but it is also strange to ask for undo the received Accept.

Is it possible to implement such functionality? (in SE, I know it is possible in general :))

Couple of points I think should be there too:

  • Are you sure it is not in Details and Options part of documentation?

  • Be aware that it is not a debugging service. (only in case of long code block detection, it is going to be tricky since there are no code blocks :) )

  • mathematica.SE != math.SE

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  • This is a frequently-discussed topic on MetaStackOverflow. I expect we're limited to what the SO community generally consider to be suitable dialogs and delay times. (Unless it's configurable on a site basis, in which case let's have a mimimum wait period of 24 hours, so that people in every time zone get a chance to join in...)
    – cormullion
    Aug 6, 2013 at 16:02
  • I see that you updated the question but you kept the "Do not accept today!" wording; intentionally?
    – Mr.Wizard
    Aug 6, 2013 at 23:10
  • @Mr.Wizard I've only corrected typos, I will extend form of the question tomorrow, I do not want to do this in hurry. Good night (evening). But after reading rm-rf's comment this edit will be only for transparency for future visitors :)
    – Kuba Mod
    Aug 6, 2013 at 23:26

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I'm down-voting this proposal. You see, I'm the primary advocate of the "please consider waiting 24-hours..." comment that you're tired of. I think it works quite well, and I'm happy with the Accept behavior on our site. I even used it as a positive example in one of those MSO threads cormullion mentioned.

Additionally, while I advocate waiting to Accept an answer I would not support forcing people to wait. Those who are not interested in such convention will probably just ignore the Accept mechanism entirely, which is by far a worse problem than quick Accepts.

If you personally are uncomfortable with suggesting that a user wait a bit longer to Accept after he has selected your answer you are surely not required to do so! (If it's a matter of undoing the Accept you can always phrase it as "next time..." instead.)

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  • I'm definitely against forced delay. But why do you think dialog window is a bad idea? It is not agressive nor annoying since it will pop up once for each user. Additional remarks about Details&Options, etc. should cause less duplicate/out of scope/simple mistake questions.
    – Kuba Mod
    Aug 6, 2013 at 21:46
  • @Kuba Pardon me for misrepresenting your suggestion. However, an official pop-up stating "Do not accept today!" seems effectively equivalent to a forced wait because a reasonable user would conclude that such an official rule will be enforced. If the wording of your pop-up was more like what I commonly use I'd support that, but that's not how I interpreted your suggestion; should I have?
    – Mr.Wizard
    Aug 6, 2013 at 21:51
  • You are right. Again my colloquial writing style is causing problems. "Do not accept today" is only an example, I think more formal suggestion, like we usually put in comments is also a good solution. But notice that with "polite full form" you can mention about 1-2 things, it is because the more to read the more people will just ignore it.
    – Kuba Mod
    Aug 6, 2013 at 22:01
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    @Kuba I understand what you're really asking here, but unfortunately, this cannot be implemented because SE does not allow sites to change the info in the popup box for new users (or at least, has not allowed for any of the other 100+ sites despite several of them requesting it). You might not see this now, as a high rep user, but a brand new user is already shown a lot of popups, agreements, etc and 99.99% of the time, they don't read anything... I don't blame them; I didn't read it either, and clicked OK blindly just as I did with my iTunes EULA.
    – rm -rf Mod
    Aug 6, 2013 at 23:01
  • @rm-rf Well, this seems to be the answer :) I will gladly accept it... the day after tomorrow :) So we have to keep trying to make this site useful, not so hard to do and what a fun :)
    – Kuba Mod
    Aug 6, 2013 at 23:33
  • I've made the edit :) Also, I want to notice that it is before midday and I have two hasty accepts and voted to close 2 questions with answers easily found in details and options :)
    – Kuba Mod
    Aug 7, 2013 at 9:17

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