Timeline for Can an Advice post be changed into a QA post (or vice versa)?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Post Revisions
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 7 at 16:57 | comment | added | OrangeDog | @NateEldredge I'm neither new nor low-rep, and I also was completely confused by what was going on. | |
| Dec 3, 2025 at 14:57 | history | edited | Thom AMod |
1. I didn't realise I hadn't added the [status-review] tag. 2. This is really [status-planned] but staff should really add that.
|
|
| Dec 1, 2025 at 19:23 | history | edited | Thom AMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
denote desire to be in both directions
|
| Nov 3, 2025 at 21:57 | comment | added | dumbass | @cigien It was never an “advice” question, just mistakenly submitted as one. That doesn’t necessarily make it a well-posed regular question. That it suffers from the “unviable proximate goal as a poor substitute of the ultimate goal” problem doesn’t fundamentally change its nature as a “how to solve a specific programming problem” question. | |
| Nov 3, 2025 at 16:01 | vote | accept | Remy Lebeau | ||
| Nov 3, 2025 at 12:14 | comment | added | cigien | @julaine That wouldn't explain why it was well-received as an "advice" question (since the question was the same in both cases). Lots of comments on the original post suggested to make it a regular Q&A, and the feedback on this meta post says the same. If the "correct" approach is to take a well received "advice" question and make it a poorly received Q&A question, just because it's technically Q&A, something is very wrong with the system. | |
| Nov 3, 2025 at 10:34 | comment | added | julaine | @cigien I speculate some of the downvotes are because of topic: "How do I make my incorrect code run okayish by detecting some implementation-details" is not well-received because many will feel like the correct/helpful response to anything like that is "This is UB, don't do it! <link to explanation of what that means>". There are tons of these questions in C and C++ and even though they are not technically duplicates or bad questions, they are not really novel either. | |
| Nov 3, 2025 at 9:25 | comment | added | cigien | The OP has now posted this as regular Q&A stackoverflow.com/questions/79807432 but is poorly received (-2 currently). I'm not entirely sure why; maybe it was the commentary/responses that they copy-pasted from the original "advice" question. I also don't know what the exact reception was on the original question (but it was +1 total). Regardless, there probably should be some advice on how exactly to repost questions as Q&A. It's understandable that OP doesn't want to lose previous context, but it's not clear (even to me) how best to do that. | |
| Nov 2, 2025 at 18:33 | comment | added | Peter Cordes | @NateEldredge: That's been the case for all four such questions I've seen in the tags I monitor (assembly, cpu-architecture, atomic, x86, etc.) with one of them being marginal because it's asking about number of physical CPU register vs. architectural, so not about programming directly. Being an advice question or not doesn't change whether it's potentially off-topic for that reason (I'd say not, but some others would.) The UI is overall a lot worse for these kinds of questions, and this is one of the problems the community predicted when this feature was announced. :/ | |
| Nov 2, 2025 at 15:42 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | Maybe it would help if low-rep users could only post open-ended questions by going through the Staging Ground, where experienced users could assess which question type is most appropriate before approving. I'm not sure that a brief explanation in the new question UI would be sufficient. | |
| Nov 2, 2025 at 15:39 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | This has also been my main observation so far with the "open-ended question" feature: most of the ones I've seen should be normal questions, because they have objective factual answers, but they were posted by new or low-rep users who probably don't understand the difference between the question types. It is indeed very annoying because the "open-ended" format works poorly for factual questions, and as mentioned there is no way to convert them. | |
| Nov 2, 2025 at 15:32 | answer | added | Thom AMod | timeline score: 17 | |
| Nov 2, 2025 at 9:43 | comment | added | Weijun Zhou | @cocomac Thank you. Maybe I should have said "no obvious way" instead. Not to mention the comment is not displayed at all if you look at the question. | |
| Nov 2, 2025 at 9:40 | comment | added | cocomac | @WeijunZhou "... no way to add real comments to these posts" Well... it is possible ;) [this is not an endorsement of using SO Q&A to post test content] | |
| Nov 2, 2025 at 7:11 | history | became hot meta post | |||
| Nov 2, 2025 at 2:34 | comment | added | Weijun Zhou | Note all those replies that appear to be comments are actually answers in the system and have "/a/" links to them. The UI is confusing and currently there are no way to add real comments to these posts. I also think maybe it should be reported here instead but putting forward a standalone feature request may also have its value. | |
| Nov 2, 2025 at 1:44 | history | asked | Remy Lebeau | CC BY-SA 4.0 |