Latest weeks I see more and more questions that are duplicates or almost duplicates of questions and answers that have posted earlier.
As quantities of questions and answeres rise I have myself - as a very regular user - also difficulties with searching effective.
Of course it all starts with attitude of the person who asked the question. And also with the way others respond on it. I have seen lots of variants.
But there is also the technical side of it. How to search the forum effective? How can we improve (as users) the search possibilities by using tags etc? How can the forum be improved for searching? Here are possibilities for a moderator and it ends with technicalities.
There are lots of kinds of searching through our forum. It all starts with one of the next 6 starting ponts:
- tags
- people
- badges
- questions
- unanswered
- follow
When we choose one of these starts we have "search or ask your question".
For me the main problem is entering text in this field very often give no results. I am afraid it has something todo with my patience and with growing quantities and performance.
But people get also the idea they need to push the button "ask a question" without waiting long enough. And I think this is a risk for getting more duplicate questions.
The quantity of tags and almost duplicates makes tags also less effective I think we need to cleanup things. I tried to, there is a button "retag" but I don't know how to save the retags. I can do this only by using more "force": editing the question.
I definitely agree with the need to have a good clean up of the tags, there are far too many which are very similar. Perhaps they could also be sorted into categories to ease browsing, although I guess this is what the tags are attempting to do already!
Do you know that you can clean up tags yourself? You simply go to the posts where they were created/used and edit them there. A tag will go away only when no posts refer to it.
In my last lines I already discussed the retag function. For me it doesn't work, I need to use the edit function to retag. I don't know what I am doing wrong. I use the Chrome Browser.
To retag with the retag button, you need to write your news tags separated by a space then press Enter key.