Minecraft crash question duplicates and SEO

Question

The current meta Minecraft crash questions should be made off-topic: yes/no? seems to agree that Minecraft crash questions should be outlawed with an exception for vanilla crashes.

Now I assume we all agree that even most of our vanilla crash questions are awful and they are typically voted down and closed as unclear.

Now I am not saying that is bad, but as a user of the site, makes me unhappy, since by doing that, I am not actually helping people that came looking for help. Obviously, the people asking all these questions are unhappy as well, seeing that they weren't helped.

IMO, there is typically not that many different things that can cause Vanilla Minecraft to crash, which makes most of these questions duplicates. Now, closing as a duplicate is much more satisfying, since it actually helps people. The problem now is that for many of these questions, finding a sensible, coherent duplicate that actually has an answer is quite difficult.

I am aware that Is there a list of error codes for Minecraft?, actually contains the answer to most of these issues, but this question has one major disadvantage: SEO. As in quite often, it is low in the search results even when searching for a header of that particular answer. For search terms such as ig4dev64.dll, it does not show up at all, and we had two questions about this issue within the last 24 hours (both of which are now on hold).

Now, instead of trying to curate and using a single all-encompassing answer to all Minecraft errors, I suggest creating questions containing minimal (non-)working examples of the crashes, including a clear question title. These should be easily findable with the correct keywords, and serve as clear duplicates. Note that question age should play no part in closing as duplicate, only quality.

As an example (this meta is really more of an afterthought of that), I have created and CW-answered the following, seeing that the duplicate I found was far from a MWE.

Minecraft crashes on launch with EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION, Problematic frame: ig4dev32.dll or ig4dev64.dll or ig4icd32.dll or ig4icd64.dll

Answer 1

On the SEO front & duplication, I thought I'd have a look around at this ig4dev32.dll & co issue. I found quite a few questions of the same crash around, in varying states of duplication, closure, and answers. Let's rectify that.

Best Questions

These two questions are answered well and have upvotes and general activity.

1. MrLemon's 'Seed' Question: Minecraft crashes on launch with EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION, Problematic frame: ig4dev32.dll or ig4dev64.dll or ig4icd32.dll or ig4icd64.dll
   • 5 months old, 2795 views
2. Laricus Rich's Question: Minecraft Forge 1.7.10 keeps crashing as soon as I launch the game with EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005)?
   • 14 months old, 23414 views

Others

These are questions that have the same crash, but are closed or otherwise abandoned.

Duplicates of #1

1. Minecraft "A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment"
2. Minecraft 1.7.9 won't launch

Duplicates of #2

1. Minecraft crashes with "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005)" (Marked Duplicate of the above)
2. https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/205643/exception-access-violation-0xc0000005 (actually duped to the above question, a 'dupe chain' as it were)

Subsequently Deleted (10k only links)

1. Minecraft Launcher gives an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION Fatal Error (58 views)
2. Java Hotspot 64-bit Server VM Warning (34 views)

Both of these were duped to #1 before being deleted.

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So, onto the plan of action:

• Merge Question #2 into Question #1. Done!
  • Whilst Larcius' has been around for longer and has more views, I feel the question itself would need to be generalised too much for it to be our 'golden' source of truth, as it were. Thus I recommend that this question be merged (or simply duplicated) with MrLemon's more generalised one.
• Duplicate the rest to Question #1
  • Ideally, they should all be duplicated to the same source, and their viewcount monitored over the next year or so. If they are redirecting lots of users to the canonical question, they should stay. If they aren't getting many views, they should be deleted.

If there's any of this particular crash's questions I've missed, please edit them in.

Answer 2

I don't like this idea. I think it has the possibility of creating more harm than good, for a number of reasons. It's why I said we should close all Minecraft crashes questions, not just ones that don't pertain to vanilla.

We can't close every Minecraft crashes question as dupe of the example question. It's not feasible in the slightest. Nor can we properly maintain a bevy of distinct Minecraft crashes questions, even if they're good! But even if we could maintain such a list (we really can't), can we be expected to properly close every Mincraft crashes question that comes along to it's corresponding question on the exalted list? No, we can't! Finding the proper dupe will be hard at best, and may well be impossible for some questions. At the very least, there will always be questions coming in that break the mold and don't have a suitable question to dupe to, and will therefore need to be duped to some generic Minecraft crashes question.

Which begs the question, why aren't the questions on the list duped to that generic Minecraft crashes question? Surely if any given Minecraft crashes question can be duped to a generic question, then every Minecraft crashes question can be duped to a generic question. Why don't we do that instead? Let's be honest with each other; in most cases, we really can't solve these problems, and it isn't worth it for us to try.