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It seems SE sites get a lot of "shopping questions", especially from new members.
Perhaps this could be remediated by disabling the editor area until the user has been seen to click on the FAQ (or a subset of it). Wouldn't it benefit everyone overall?

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  • 5
    Try and ask a new question from a brand new account and see what it shows you
    – random Mod
    Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 17:31
  • 6
    People who don't want to read the FAQ, won't.
    – Oliver Salzburg Mod
    Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 18:18
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    If forced to many people will just skip it in the same way an an EULA.
    – Hennes
    Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 18:23
  • If anything, we'd probably be better off with keywords in questions triggering a "potentially off-topic" warning with recommendations on where to ask instead such as iPad but I'm not sure how workable or friendly it would be...
    – Graham Wager
    Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 23:47

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Reset to default
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Perhaps this could be remediated by disabling the editor area until the user has been seen to click on the FAQ (or a subset of it).

And this does what, makes them prove they can click?

Naw, if you wanna force them to read it, there's only one solution:

Forced reading

There is an option to force folks to click through https://superuser.com/questions/how-to-ask before you get to /questions/ask, but that's less about introducing the scope of the site and more about just encouraging folks to think about their question a bit (and search for it!) before posting it.

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  • You only get them to look at it this way, not to read it. Perhaps direct upload to the brain, Matrix-style?
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Jan 26, 2013 at 5:10
  • @DanielBeck: People also tend to read and still not understand (or wilfully ignore), so unfortunately even a direct upload to the brain might not help.
    – Karan
    Commented Jan 27, 2013 at 17:35

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