[SOLVED] What to do with posts of little or no **intrinsic** value ?

Cbhihe · 2023-01-13 19:09:47

Just a plain user here with a doubt on some thread I started, but turned out to be of little value as perceived by me, the author, and surely also by others given the attention it attracted. I know people might jump at my use of the expression "intrinsic value" in the Post's title because it is hard to define at best, and open to at least some interpretation even though the guidelines are also there to somewhat ensure post quality.

Two months ago I posted this thread. It seems to be a good example of a question with little or no "intrinsic value" even though at the time I thought I was onto something. The post garnered 460+ views and a whopping 0 answers to date, perhaps because it was considered too host-install specific, too uninspiring, too trivial, not system critical or for any other reason including all of the above. <BR>
In any case from my standpoint that post is of little value because:
- a subsequent although tardy package update made the issue disappear,
- there is no technical explanation as to what caused the issue and what made it disappear.
- it got no answer and had relatively few views.

So, after reading Is there a coherent policy for closing topics here?, Topic closing and the General guidelines, which states among other things: "you should avoid using [CLOSED], which is instead used by the system to mark a thread which is no longer accessible for new posts." what should be done with a post such as mine as referenced above ? I think it's basically brown noise and I seldom encounter others on the forum with so little value. It has very little or no educational value for other Arch users. Shouldn't such post just be deleted ?

Last edited by Cbhihe (2023-01-13 21:36:25)

jasonwryan · 2023-01-13 19:13:41

You can use the report button to request deletion, moving to TGN where it won't be indexed by search engines, or just mark it solved (there may be some use as a historical artifact).

Cbhihe · 2023-01-13 21:37:35

Yep, that treatment seems adequate enough. Tx.

Trilby · 2023-01-13 22:16:06

Cbhihe wrote:

... perhaps because it was ... too uninspiring, too trivial, not system critical

Well, those are the characteristics that draw everyone to respond. Anyone can paint a bike shed!

Well formed questions with detailed diagnostics often get fewer replies as the set of useful replies is already much smaller: most threads go through several stages of basic diagnostics.

In any case, it appears that issue was solved. What the specific root cause and which package upgrade fixed it is unknown, but it's still solved. If you were really interested in pin pointing what had gone wrong, you could downgrade some packages and explore - but that doesn't seem worth it. However, the thread may be useful data point for someone else: in the near future someone else might face the same problem and see that an update should fix it. Farther off, someone may face a related problem and be able to see that it has happened before; and if they are so inclined, they could check the archives to see what versions of which packages changed in the time period that your solution came ... and then they could look at changelogs for those packages, etc, etc.

That has as much value as any solved thread on the forums. Of course it is your thread - so if you'd rather it be binned, mods would almost certainly do so on request.

Cbhihe · 2023-01-14 10:24:19

Yes @Trilby, I can see the educational value in the fact that a trace of the issue may perhaps, maybe, who knows, etc... be useful to someone digging deeper in the future. But it remains small nevertheless in the face of the probability of such a thing occurring... So keeping that in mind for ALL my future low quality posts (:-P) I have asked mods to move it to TGN. Tx.

Arch Linux

#1 2023-01-13 19:09:47