Standard responses to poor questions

Question

The Joomla StackExchange has been growing steadily to the point that we seem to be getting a fair amount of poor questions. I appreciate all the answers provided on this site, so I hope that we can continue to get good questions that are answerable and not get bogged down helping new users learn what a good question is (or worse, dealing with spam...)

To help with this, I think it could be beneficial for us to have a base set of responses to comment on poor questions. The less time we spend responding to these new users, the better in my opinion. To make this not feel super canned, I think that we can group poor questions into a couple of buckets:

1. Spam - posts just to link to a website, barely understandable, no real question
2. Not enough information - short one-line questions, typically just states that it "doesn't work"
3. Extension specific - question related to a bug or issue with a specific use of a non-core extension
4. "Can I do this?" - questions that show no effort to actually try and solve their problem
5. "Is there an extension for this?" - questions that want a plugin recommendation

Feel free to update the community wiki answer below and comment with other groups of users and discuss how best to respond to hopefully grow the community while saving us time!

Answer 1

Spam questions/answers:

• Don't bother responding to spam. Just flag to delete

Responses to questions that are too broad:

• "Hi [user], welcome to JSE. Good questions provide as much information as possible. Please add code samples, error messages, and exactly what you expect to happen to get the best answers possible."
• "Yes it is possible but you're not going to get a solution here without effort. Show us you've tried something and focus your question on a specific problem to get an answer here"

Responses to questions regarding 3rd party extensions:

• "Have you considered reaching out to the extension developer? While there may be someone in this community with experience in this extension, your best bet is to follow up with the developer directly."
• "I'm sure there will be an extension out there to fulfill your requirements. Please Check on the Joomla Extensions Directory."

Responses to questions looking for an extension

• "The extensions available for Joomla are constantly changing. I'm sure there will be an extension out there to fulfill your requirements. Please Check on the Joomla Extensions Directory."