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When I write questions on Super User, I often find that I am rejected when I click submit after typing a paragraph; including my previous research on the subject, and so on.

It says that my question does not meet our quality standards. However, other people can just write questions like the question is as simple as the title and get away with it?! How is this fair, and how can I get this fixed?

While writing this meta question, it happened again...

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  • 9
    Perhaps you should start Capitalizing the first letter of a sentence and change i into capital I. That goes a long way of making your questions more readable. One would hope that after having so many of your questions edited on other SE-sites, you would have learned by now. Based on the quality of this question, I'd say that the filter is working as intended
    – Ivo Flipse Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 11:18
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    You really don't see what the problem is here? Really? It's hard to resist editing your question right now.
    – Supercereal
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 12:38
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    @Tom while I appreciate you edited the question, it ruins the point we're trying to make: he should learn to write decent questions, not rely on us editing it for him
    – Ivo Flipse Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 16:56
  • @IvoFlipse: It was just another example for him, I don't see why you would rollback to lower quality. The Why did he edit my stuff like that? thought actually sets the point, and does not ruin it. Going through all his posts, though, would be a different situation...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 16:57
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    @TomWijsman This questions would answer itself if left at revision 1. It's not actually lower quality in this case, because the bad formatting, grammar, and bad legibility really do add value in this case.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 18:15
  • @IvoFlipse [status-bydesign]?
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 18:16
  • Capitalisation is merely arbitrary convention. It is not a fixed and immutable rule, and the trend in English for centuries has been towards less capitalisation - documents from 200 or even 100 years ago seem absurdly over-capitalised to modern eyes. Furthermore, you are ignoring the fact that language changes over time (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change)
    – cas
    Commented Sep 15, 2013 at 2:58
  • I have this issue when I use the iOS app. I cannot post answers or questions from there. I have to copy them to my e-mail and save them until I can post from my desktop.
    – L.B.
    Commented Dec 29, 2014 at 18:06

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Your meta question was an example of low quality.

Your keyboard is blessed with a key labeled as "Shift". Use it, please.

In English, you should capitalize:

  • The beginning of a sentence
  • The personal pronoun "I"

Of course, Stack Exchange sites are not an English class you have to take, but think about your readers. Proper capitalization will ensure that your posts are easy to read – plus, you won't come off as lazy.

Here's an example from Feb 4th:

  • Capitalize "I" and the beginning of sentences
  • Don't use "Problem" in titles, it's not a valid description of an issue
  • Add paragraphs to your walls of text so they're easier to parse

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    They say paragraphs let your text breathe...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 17:03
  • One forum I used to frequent had a minimum "business English" requirement. One of the major reasons for that was because the memberbase was international, and many of them did not have English as a first language. Here, it's a similar situation. Many members here are not as comfortable with English as others may be, so taking the effort to write properly and clearly goes a long way towards getting an answer to your question more quickly.
    – Ben Richards
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 18:52
  • I get that my punctuation and capitalization needs some work, however i fail to see why one-sentence questions are being submitted while my several paragraph, descriptive and, frankly more helpful posts are being rejected!
    – Jon Valentine
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 19:15
  • The specific implementation of the quality filter is not publicly known. However, I generally agree with you that one-sentence questions should not be able to pass the filter (and I have already pointed this out before). It'd be more constructive though if you can collect some examples that (per your reasoning) should have been blocked. @tha
    – slhck
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 19:19
  • @ThatGuy: For the research back-end, the low quality filter makes sense as it gives us quite some posts. But I feel that towards questions should better be interpreted as a low readability filter.
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 19:24

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