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The ever present issue about "how to handle Minecraft Crash questions" has gained itself another meta question.

We have had a few good meta posts in the past, like

However, this really hasn't slowed the flow of questions.

I have not seen many (if at all) duplicate Minecraft crash questions, and I daresay that by now, many of them would be/should be.

What can we do to fix this? Is there anything we could do? Or should do?

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  • 14
    It probably won't ever stop. Thing about error messages and stack traces, is that they can continually give you errors after errors, and without the code, the best you can do is guess. Add in mods with zero oversight or quality control, and you have our current predicament. Best we can do is shut them down quickly until they provide the required information. Best part about that is, rarely these users come back to give that info. So the question gets closed, and deleted.
    – Frank
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 4:55
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    Perhaps we should be more vigilant in updating the List of Possible Minecraft Errors, and start redirecting users there first, if not outright marking as duplicate. Also: adding sections like 'Likely Modding Errors' (NoClassDefFound etc), General Client Errors (Launcher/Updater Crash) etc
    – Robotnik Mod
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 7:12
  • 1
    Doesn't it only cover the multi-player errors? (ie. I can't login to server X!) Anyone mind if I clean it up and sort it between the errors that you see in-game, and those in error logs, like the "Java has run out of memory. (java.lang.OutOfMemoryError)"?
    – aytimothy
    Commented Nov 22, 2014 at 7:18
  • 4
    I don't think there's anything to do about this. The people posting these questions have usually done no research, nor have they put any effort into solving the problem themselves. Meta posts are read by users of the site, no fly-by help vampires.
    – TZHX
    Commented Nov 22, 2014 at 12:12
  • Couldn't a "READ HERE FIRST" sign be implemented? To ask them to do look up the answer (if any) before posting? (And then, if one of those came through - We could just mark as duplicate; the "You're obviously blind enough to not see that <this> (an already-identified issue) was your problem, and here's [insert instructions] to fix it." | Or force them to actually open the page before being able to post it. But then again: Would be hard to implement, based on prediction of what the asker has entered.
    – aytimothy
    Commented Nov 22, 2014 at 17:06
  • @aytimothy - at the moment yes, which is why I'm saying we should expand it.
    – Robotnik Mod
    Commented Nov 22, 2014 at 23:54
  • Yeah, that's boring as hell. Please see my comments or answers! %50 of lately is just "Minecraft Crashes"
    – ave
    Commented Nov 23, 2014 at 0:05
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    Feature Request: Tips before asking (according to title/tags): like if it contains minecraft and crash or bug, then it might show this and this and say "Please view these before asking."
    – ave
    Commented Nov 23, 2014 at 0:09
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    @ardaozkal, I agree with you. But all that does is improve the quality of questions (ish; not at all), but they'll all be ultimately asking the same thing, and have (most of the time) the same answer. | There needs to be a link saying "Look up your error here first. THEN you can ask."
    – aytimothy
    Commented Nov 23, 2014 at 1:29
  • What we ought to do is either have a tag devoted to Minecraft crashes and/or a way for users to hide questions which use certain tags, if that isn't already implemented.
    – EnragedTanker
    Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 19:05

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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On Anime and Manga when you use the Identification Request Tag you get a red box around the tag area with a notice suggesting to use the Google Reverse Image search with a link to a Meta Post detailing how you do it.

id request tag notice

I dare say that a similar thing could be done with where we have a notice like this and include a link to a Meta Post which contains links to the Metas Ben posted but also any other Metas/Answers/Sites we want (ie. the link Robotnik shared, a link to the Gamepedia Wiki).

Example Message

Are you looking to solve a Minecraft Bug/Crash problem? Please look into This Meta Post to find possibly solutions and information which can help you post a better Question and receive better answers

This would be a bit more "In your Face" than updating the Tag Wiki with this information however it won't solve the problem entirely since there will always be people just too lazy to go into the link, there's no helping them. This will mainly conglomerate relevant information into a single place for easy reference (the link Robotnik shared I didn't know about so it was a great find) to help those who are willing to put in the effort

NOTE: I am unsure if this functionality works with them Stack Exchange App

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  • If this option is viable, then also as an added option to the meta could be that someone could develop a Stack Exchange Data Explore Query to list existing Minecraft Bug/Crash Questions as a somewhat low maintenance way of listing helpful questions
    – Memor-X
    Commented Nov 23, 2014 at 23:57
  • Wait.. "New" (<5 reputation) users can view, but not participate (vote, comment, post etc.) right? But then again.. Isn't that dialogue appearing based on the tag and not the fact that the post contains a really long crash log?
    – aytimothy
    Commented Nov 24, 2014 at 8:23
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    @aytimothy yes, the dialog appears based off from the fact the tag is used, if the user is going to put effort into their question then they will read. If we want to try and stop people posting unformatted crash dumps (my Meta Community Answer than Ben posted talks about this) then the best we can do is also add the same system that Stack Overflow uses to detect when the user has posted nothing but code. However I am unsure how it work so I didn't mention it, I've only see a message appear when I went to paste in code before I explain it
    – Memor-X
    Commented Nov 24, 2014 at 8:45
  • @aytimothy with your ""New" (<5 reputation)" comment (i replied earlier on the App so i could check out the privileges) that applies only to Participating in the Meta so even a brand new user can read the Meta so new users wont be disadvantaged by this but
    – Memor-X
    Commented Nov 24, 2014 at 21:31
  • this applies regardless of rep also, i have 7100+ rep on Anime and Manga and an ID Request Tag Score of 65 (35 off getting the bronze badge) and since Anime and Manga is still Beta the rep requirements of Privilages are lower for the upper tiers (Beta Trusted User = 4,000 Rep, Graduated Trusted User = 20,000 Rep) and i still get the message so all users, old and new, should see this change when next they post a Minecraft question
    – Memor-X
    Commented Nov 24, 2014 at 21:33
  • Then that's good.
    – aytimothy
    Commented Nov 24, 2014 at 23:35
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Let's add some stats to this discussion:

  • 348 posts match [minecraft] crashes
  • Of those, 218 are questions
    • 31 are closed (9 of which are dupes), 187 are open
    • 35 have no answer, 116 have at least one answer, but no accepted answer, and 67 have an accepted answer
    • 68 have a net score of 0, 102 have a net positive score, meaning 50 have a net negative score
    • 7 of the closed questions have a positive score, 9 have a 0 score, so 15 (almost half) have a negative score.

Some things to also realize is that there are a number of questions that, according to our relatively new criteria, should be closed (my guess would be more of the negative score questions, but not necessarily all of them), and some of these questions don't even belong in this discussion. Also, this search might not catch every Minecraft Crashes question. With that said, the numbers say that this class of question isn't a big problem, even if it's perceived to be.

As to why It's perceived as a big problem, well personally, I think it's because most of the questions are untestable (because it's nearly impossible to reproduce the problem), and therefore the proposed solution lacks verifiability. This means we're basically guessing, and we don't like to guess. It's because of this, the common practice of not getting all of the requested information out of the gate, and the incredible similarity between all the questions despite not really being able to close them as dupe that really frustrates us.

Let's not forget that we still get lots of good Minecraft questions. In particular, I've seen a pleasing surge in good questions.

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  • What you're missing is the vast amount of deleted questions. You'd need to do a SEDE query to really get that. Until then, though, this data is misleading to a rather extreme degree.
    – Frank
    Commented Dec 31, 2014 at 14:50
  • @Frank data explorer won't show me deleted questions, and I'm not sure it'll show 10kers them either. You're free to give it a try.
    – MBraedley
    Commented Dec 31, 2014 at 15:45
  • Well, you can get a list of deleted posts, but you have to use votes to do it. The actual rows in the posts database gets deleted as well, so there's no way to tie it into an actual query. Huh. I was sure SEDE had that. I guess we'd need a mod to use their mod is:deleted search to get us an accurate number of questions that match. What I can find, though, from the 10K tools says the Roomba got rid of three Minecraft closed questions yesterday alone. With the bad ones only sticking around for a maximum of ten days, we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg on this.
    – Frank
    Commented Dec 31, 2014 at 17:38
  • They don't get removed from the actual database; if they were, you'd never be able to undelete them. I suspect deleted posts are filtered out of the data dump to the data explorer.
    – MBraedley
    Commented Dec 31, 2014 at 17:46
  • Why do I yield no results on that query? Do we have to have a minimum reputation to see the minecraft tag?
    – Taco
    Commented Jul 28, 2021 at 21:06
  • No, the query needs to be updated because I think the tag has changed to minecraft-java-edition.
    – MBraedley
    Commented Jul 28, 2021 at 21:10

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