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My question What are the components in a Skyrim Special Edition save filename? has gotten two downvotes in its first eight views. Neither downvoter commented, even though a request for comments on why it's bad was added to the question after the first downvote.

What makes this a bad question? This is a serious query; I honestly don't see how this is off-topic or prohibited, and it's certainly not subjective. I did supply a partial answer, but I made it a community wiki answer to help ensure that it's not seen as trolling for reputation (though that was secondary: it's intended to be a community answer).

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  • there is 1 close vote to the question which is "Questions about Game Design and Development are off topic. This includes speculative questions about developer intent, with respect to both mechanics and narrative. You might want to ask over at GameDev.SE, but be sure to read their FAQ". quite possible that the downvoters voted it down as "not useful" because knowing the contents of the save game filename wont help them play. it might help build mods but i would assume that's something for GameDev
    – Memor-X
    Commented Nov 26, 2017 at 11:32
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    As a sidenote, comments on downvotes are completely optional, and asking for them isn't going to help. It definitely doesn't belong as part of the question, and was rightly removed.
    – Frank
    Commented Nov 26, 2017 at 14:52
  • Well, I did describe what I use the information for (making it easier to clean up save files, which easily saves many tens of megabytes of space with Skyrim), but that part of my question was removed by @DanmakuGrazer. Does that have something to do with game design and/or development?
    – cjs
    Commented Nov 26, 2017 at 19:42
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    It was removed because you were asking about the downvotes in that passage. Just explain the need for this kind of information in the question without going off-topic.
    – dly
    Commented Nov 30, 2017 at 8:14
  • If you know you have a good solid Q&A, there is no shame in answering your own question. No need to mark as a community wiki if you have done your own research.
    – JonathanDavidArndt
    Commented Dec 8, 2017 at 0:30

1 Answer 1

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It's not a bad question, but it's certainly not useful.

I'm trying to think of ways that this information could be beneficial to someone and I can't think of anything besides "now you know these are the parts of a save file and how to read them".

Most of this information is clear: Autosave VS Quicksave, time, location...

Downvotes are used as a way to express the thought that a question is not useful, which I can see why this would be the case. They are also completely independent of "close votes" which have a totally different meaning.

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    I use it to help me more quickly clean out old save files. (Given that they start at a couple of megabytes each and grow from there, they can take up quite a lot of space.) An editor felt that this was information better removed from the question.
    – cjs
    Commented Nov 30, 2017 at 3:06
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    I'm curious why this answer received downvotes, because that seems to be exactly the case. Why does an explanation receive downvotes just because you might not agree with it?
    – Tim S.
    Commented Dec 8, 2017 at 15:12
  • @CurtJ.Sampson if you feel that an edit was made to your question that shouldn't have been made, add the content back again. I don't always agree that edits are a good thing, sometimes it drastically affects the angle of the question.
    – Tim S.
    Commented Dec 8, 2017 at 15:13
  • I take back my previous comment -- don't post about downvoting, (that's why it was edited out). Instead post of the possible reasons why this information would be useful. If you want the question to get attention and upvotes (thus increase chances of an answer), make it the most useful for the most number of people possible. (And don't mention voting in the question.)
    – Tim S.
    Commented Dec 8, 2017 at 15:15
  • @TimS. I'm curious to that as well. As for as the meta goes, downvotes here are usually cast because people disagree with the concept of the site, it's not necessarily about the explanation. What I don't understand is the support for the question and no counter-argument of what happened.
    – FoxMcCloud
    Commented Dec 8, 2017 at 15:42
  • @TimS. My edit both asked about the downvoting and explained why I felt the information was useful. I'd imagine that if just the downvoting query was the problem, it would be edited to remove that, but not the explanation of what I use that information for. I have no idea if my explanation of use was deleted because it was bad, or just because someone wanted to do a quick revert on something "bad" and didn't care if good stuff was removed as well. (That's why I didn't edit it back.) At any rate, someone else just edited it to add back my explanation, so I guess that part was ok.
    – cjs
    Commented Dec 9, 2017 at 16:17

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