Question and Answer Hand-Holding

Question

In the last few days, a user has been asking a lot of questions about Skyrim and Skyrim and Skyrim and so on and so forth.

I know we are a gaming-related question and answer website, but honestly, it's getting ridiculous, and that's not even all the questions he's posted. I've seen questions in the past, with more effort than his, flagged for closure as having little to no effort put into them.

I get that we're a site that accepts all questions, but these are even basic game mechanics (*see: who can I sell books to?), and really, it just seems like we're holding the user's hand throughout their entire playing experience.

Is enough becoming enough? Am I the only one annoyed by this, and considering it basically spam at this point?

Answer 1

Is enough becoming enough?

No. These questions are technically on-topic, though I would definitely agree with you that they are poor quality (a simple Google search answers some of these, and most of the others can be found with some additional research). However, you need to keep in mind that on SE, there is a strong difference between closing a question and downvoting it. Closing a question implies that the question cannot or should not be answered, because it is too broad, unclear, or simply not something we cover on the site. Downvoting a question implies that the question is poor quality or not helpful to other users. There are questions that have many upvotes that are closed for being off-topic, and there are also questions that are not closed that are heavily downvoted.

If this user continues posting poor quality questions, the system will eventually catch on and question ban him.

Am I the only one annoyed by this?

No, you definitely not. As much as I'd love to smite some of these questions with a close vote, I refrain from doing so because, as I explained above, that would inappropriate. Instead, I have to settle for a mere downvote which, although perhaps less satisfying, allows the system to handle the question correctly.

...considering it basically spam at this point?

It's also technically not spam. It's not advertising anything, it's not a bunch of random letters and symbols whose primary purpose is to suck up bandwidth. They are legitimate questions. In fact, if this user had waited a week between each question, I doubt this would have been brought to meta at all.

Answer 2

If you mouseover the downvote button you'll see this tooltip:

^{This question does not show any research effort, it's unclear or not useful}

If you don't think the questions are useful, if you don't think they show research effort, or if you don't understand what they're trying to ask, downvote them. Cumulative community voting is what separates 'bad' questions from 'good' or even 'great' questions.

The other thing you can do, is answer them (the ones that are on-topic & not closed of course). If they're simple questions it's likely that it will also be a relatively simple answer.

Here's the thing: we want Arqade to rank high in people's search results, so if a question is 'simple' but a common one that a lot of people will ask, let's make sure we have an answer for them when they find us.

As to the frequency of questions over time: there is already an automatic 'block' of sorts that kicks in if a user is posting too frequently. The block is temporary and the exact triggers are not known to the public, but I've hit it in the past myself. If you're that worried about a bunch of easy Skyrim questions clogging up your feed, you could temporarily block the tag using the 'Ignore tag' feature (with your preferences set to hide ignored tags).