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I asked a question here about two weeks ago and have gotten very little response. I have since sort of found a solution. I suppose this is more of a complaint at this point, but I hope I can get some sort of feedback from you guys on this and I hope you understand that I'm not trying to be rude, rather offer a constructive suggestion.

Here is the link to my question: Program that seeks out relevant files, then downloads, tags, and organizes them into folders

I do appreciate your attempt at helping me, however it seems much more time has been spent on worrying about the format of my post rather than finding the program I am looking for. I can respect wanting posts to be legible, but I think the user should be far more important than his grammar (although, I do not think my grammar has even been that terrible thus far). I am a new user, and I DID go through what guides were offered here to give me advice on how to formulate my post. Nevertheless it seems that was still not good enough to merit a real answer and the format of my post was still more important than giving me an answer. Maybe I've just had a bad first experience, but I will not be that eager to resort to a StackExchange website to get the answers I need from now on.

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    To the defence of the regulars involved, the question was quite hard to read in its initial format. Even if we don't know the answer, this seems to be a good way to ensure someone who might know the answer realises he does. And well, some questions are hard to answer. In your case, you need something that does a variety of non trivial tasks, and that's usually a hard problem. Then again, if it was easy, you'd know it already.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Oct 29, 2014 at 2:10
  • I do understand why formatting is important. However, I feel from a new users perspective that it seems formatting is MORE important than the question. My question was a complicated one, and I don't mean to say that an answer should have been found, because I can't say that I found one myself. That's why I came here. I just wonder if my question continues to be ignored because of formatting or it is legitimately a difficult question. Even some sort of message from a moderator or something to let me know something along the lines of "we tried, but this is stumping us as well" would be helpful.
    – arelevantuser
    Commented Oct 29, 2014 at 4:23
  • I just think that if another new user were to have an experience similar to mine, they would simply not return, because the majority of feedback I got was criticism of format, not actual attempts at answers. So it's hard for me to tell why there are no answers, because the post has been edited about three times now.
    – arelevantuser
    Commented Oct 29, 2014 at 4:23
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    At first, I actually took some offense to the criticism, as it seemed nothing else mattered to the people viewing my question. However, I understand now that people were not trying to be rude to me. I only mention this here because I know this is a relatively new stack exchange and you might not want this to happen to newer users.
    – arelevantuser
    Commented Oct 29, 2014 at 4:24

1 Answer 1

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I've just checked the history of your post, and will try to shed some light.

First, I've upvoted two of the comments above which give the basic insight (Journeyman's initial, and your last-at-this-time (starting with "At first..."). These are already giving some ideas.

Second, browsing the history of the question's post back to its initial version: You'll have to admit that is, no offense meant, a "wall of text". Even with some good-will, I'd stop reading at latest at line #4 for getting lost. That leaves me a few choices:

  • ignore the post and go on (so no answer for you from me)
  • as I have the rep, vote to close it for (again, no offense meant) "being of low quality"
  • leaving a comment to help you improve it (so you might have a chance of getting answers)

As we are usually a very friendly community, we decided for the last option – as the initial comment shows:

Your question is very difficult to read. Take a moment to edit the question into a legible format […]

Thus the intention was not "favoring etiquette over content", but to enable us to give you answers – which otherwise would be close to impossible.

As a general rule (not only for SE sites), if you want people to help you (eagerly), you'll try your best to make that as easy as possible for them. There are not many people who would first investigate a lot or resources to figure out what you want them to help you with, so they are able to help you ;)

We all here wish that new users feel welcome, and hope you will not take our actions as "offense" (your comment shows you've got the idea, so I'm glad I don't need to worry about that). But to put it explicitly:

Welcome to SE, specifically to SR, and I hope you feel welcome despite of initial misunderstandings!

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    @arelevantuser Also, the question was unclear and needed additional information (mainly examples). Many comments were about that, so I dispute your statement that "much more time has been spent on worrying about the format of my post rather than finding the program I am looking for". A lot of time had to be spent (not just by you) to get clear what exactly you were looking for. That's perfectly OK, that's how the process often works here.
    – user416
    Commented Oct 29, 2014 at 14:08
  • To put it into a simple sentence: "Step 1 on answering a question is understanding the question." Things had to be done to achieve exactly that ;)
    – Izzy
    Commented Oct 29, 2014 at 15:14

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