[meta] Should 'hi', 'thanks', taglines, salutations, and signatures be removed from posts?
We know that Ask fedora is powered by Askbot, and which is inspired from StackOverflow. Since StackOverflow is a much more grown and larger community, we too can improve our community by taking it as a model. One of the things I noted is that Stackoverflow has some auto filtering in place to remove salutations, and other things like 'thanks', taglines, signatures, etc., will be usually edited out by moderators or users with edit privileges. But in our Ask Fedora, currently, it all remains there.
So, what should we do with:
- Salutations: hi, hello, greetings, guys, dear, etc.,
- Thanks: thanks, thank you, thanks in advance, etc.,
- Names and email addresses
- Signatures
Taglines:
We are hiring! Developers and QA in Washington, DC area (or looking to relocate) should send resumes to careers@example.com.Verbose Introduction:
I know that this isn't the first post with this problem, but I am stuck with this for a day (total, not 1 day in a row). Somehow I can't get this to work, maybe it is just 1 little adjustment that I need to make, but I can't seem to find it :(
Should these items be removed during the editing of the post by a user with edit privilege or a moderator?
My take is that all of them to be removed. They just pollute the question or answer and it will become difficult to extract the question or answer from the post. They are just wasting readers time.
Users can thank the one who solve their problem by commenting the answer. Also, instead of writing thanks in the question, they can contribute to the community by answering, commenting and voting. That's the correct way to show gratitude.
Every post is signed with the user card which links directly to the user page. The user page belongs to that user only and they can fill it with information like their interests, email id or name, signature, tagline or anything they like.
Since this is a meta question, I expect we can have a healthy discussion(although this is a Q&A forum) and form an etiquette regarding this matter.
References:
Ideally, we want feature parity in Askbot, the underlying software. I would suggest posting a request for such a feature in http://askbot.org and get upstream involved. If you are a developer, develop a patch and request a pull via github. We have added many such features we needed in the past.
What about the manually editing out those things? It may be difficult to review old questions, but what about new questions?
Hi @Jomoos: Don't remove salutations, greetings, and thanks! We are Humans and may say hello to each other, even on a virtual platform. I don't think it "pollutes" the questions - I never had a problem to filter salutations and thanks, and find the Q or A.
Thank you! With kind regards, Florian
I don't think we need to remove salutations and thanks. But I agree with removing taglines and signatures. I'm not sure what are "names and email addresses" in questions. About verbose introductions, I think it depends; e.g. referencing similar questions makes it clear that other solutions didn't work.
Salutations and Thanks makes the support forum more lively.
But taglines might just be irrelevant and I think that should be dealt with.
Not all verbose should be removed. Sometimes, they give us an idea on the knowledge level of the person who is asking the question and we may have to answer accordingly. Giving detailed instructions to someone who is good in technical may seem redundant, but if you give brief instructions to me or to anyone at my level, I might be lost.