Does the StackExchange community certify the active and ranked people per month and quarter as a type of encouragement?

Question

I'm a new user of this great community and I'm proud of my experience with it so I'm working on it at least 8 hours per day to learn from the mistakes of others, trying to help them based on my humble experience and Also to gain a good reputation from the biggest SharePoint technical community over the world.

I only have some notes and questions which I hope to get answers.

I found out a frustrated behavior from some participants especially questioners, such as lack of interest in upvoting the useful answers and also setting it as an answer even though it's the best answer for their questions. Moreover ,the person who asked the question comments that the answer works perfectly. But they never care for voting up or even accepting it as an answer. so we can find questions that still open since 2014 !

Also, yesterday I answered a question , after 2 hours I noticed that the person who asked the question update his question with a new request and he said the blow answer solved my issue and I need also to do additional request !

I read his update and felt with frustration to continue with him. I didn't know How he thinks why he does not appreciate my time to help you via only one or two clicks based on his reputation ?!! I only tried to help him and I think he has the same feeling for me and appreciate that but I think he only needs to know How ?

My questions are that

• How can the community overcome this behavior that effect on the enthusiasm of participants especially new members like me ?

• Is there a way to encourage questioners and new user to use the benefits of the main function like set as answer , downvote ,flag , upvote ....etc by informing them it will let you gain more reputation and also it will help to increase the community interaction.

• Why there are some members with lack of enthusiasm to participate in providing answers, especially the new users ?

• What about the unanswered questions since 2014 that already have optimum answers but not set as answers from questioners ? is it will continue to push by community user forever ?

• Is StackExchange community grant a certificate of appreciation to the active and ranked members for their cooperation that sends to them via email every week ,month , quarter and year as a type of encouragement and this is also will help all participants to be more active by increasing the competition among participants.

Finally,I would like to thank all community moderators for their efforts to success this community.

Thanks

Answer 1

You are in much "nailing it" (the main challenge of SharePoint StackExchange) with your questions. Sadly there seems to be no easy fix.

In short you ask two things (if interpret you correct):

1. Why are there so many users not taking an active part in the community (asking questions and never returning etc)?
2. How can we encourage users to be more active (and also encourage active users to stay active)?

During the last year we have had mutiple separate meta-posts around the topics you mention, see for example:

• Are SharePoint SE users lazy voters?
• How can we make users include more details and ask better questions?
• 20K celebrations or do we want to cleanup those unanswered questions?
• Do dinosaur developers ever loose points on SharePoint.StackOverf[l]ow?

This is just a subset of questions all in some evolving around the topics.

Many parts of all of the StackExchange networks are designed specifically to encourage participation, the whole reputation system and the way it works is a good example.

But for some reason that does not seem to work as well on SP.SE as it does on many of the other sites in the network.

The first of the links above gives som possible explanations (these are just a few of them):

...SharePoint is less of a primary role/responsibility and they are only on SP.SE because they need an answer to a specific project or task, they don't LIVE in SharePoint; it's a side project. It's a system administrator configuring SharePoint, end-users using SharePoint, or .NET developers diving into SharePoint. @Mike

...

It's a small community If you use the measure of people with reputation above 200 (which is what StackExchange track in the leagues) as a measure for the size of the community.

Then we have 636 users and StackOverflow has 159,521, and as @dava-wise mentions more people gives more votes.

Rather many questions Within the last 24 hours 47 new questions has been posted. I think that it's very few users who read all the questions.

SharePoint is a complex product In general on SE there is a tendency of the more complex a question/answer is the less votes it get. In some cases it's hard to see if the question is specific the OPs environment or is a "valid" question. And often it's very hard to verify that the answer is correct without doing some investigation. @Per Jakobsen

Sadly, all the discussions above has not really changed the way users behave in this community, we still have a high rate of "hit-and-run" users, and users only coming here to gain knowledge, not share.

Therefore we are very happy to see new users (as yourself) coming here and embrace the community, giving it their best. So keep up the good work!

All of us that's been around for some time knows that you have to work hard to gain reputation, much harder than you really should have to. Thankfully that is true for all users so the relative ranking is still accurate (I think, but as you see in the link above, there are som different views around that too).

We are happy for all ideas about how to improve the level of participation on SP.SE.