Many questions posted do not have answers

[joeblaze211]

In the GMAT forums people post GMAT questions for practice, which I really appreciate. However, many of these posters are slow in posting the answers, so is there anyway one of the administrators can make a sticky for just the answers? That way a person can post the answer to his/her question immediately without spoiling the question for the readers. And those who want the answer can easily find it in the sticky post without waiting for days just to find the answer.

[Erin]

Yep, that's an ongoing problem. I actually created the [[tooltip=A special tag that hides selected text. See the FAQ for more info.]spoiler[/tooltip]] tag to encourage people to post the answers with the question. The problem is that some people withhold the answer hoping that the "teaser" of later having the [tooltip=Official Answer]OA[/tooltip] revealed will encourage more responses. But many times the [tooltip=Original Poster]OP[/tooltip] doesn't come back to post the answer.

 

To be honest, I don't think a sticky at the top with the answers would help; I highly doubt that people would use that system. I think the best I can do is add a note somewhere asking people to post the answers in the spoiler tag.

[jess_wundring]

In the GMAT forums people post GMAT questions for practice, which I really appreciate. However, many of these posters are slow in posting the answers, so is there anyway one of the administrators can make a sticky for just the answers? That way a person can post the answer to his/her question immediately without spoiling the question for the readers. And those who want the answer can easily find it in the sticky post without waiting for days just to find the answer.

 

Rather than making answers sticky, how about creating separate forums altogether for practice questions and their answers?

 

This way, one could have a window open on one forum to test oneself and another open to check on the answer and perhaps generate discussion around it? It would require the poster to go to two separate places in posting GMAT practice questions, but it would be a neat solution, imho. Posters would have to cut and paste the titles from Q forum to A forum, but that shouldn't pose much of a problem if they're generous enough to create their post in the first place.

[Erin]

That's a great idea in theory, but one thing I can tell you for sure is that the more complicated I make things (even adding one extra step), the less likely it will be that people will follow those steps. Sometimes even adding one extra step will discourage people (myself included!) from doing something. Case in point--people are more likely to PM somebody here than they are to email somebody.

 

The real problem, if indeed there is one, is that (and this is the case with many, if not most, forums) the forum is being used for something it's not designed for. Sure, it could work in theory, but if it's not built in already, and we rely on asking people to do something, it probably won't happen.

 

Thanks for the feedback. :)