What does one look at before answering a question?

Question

I'm curious - I see a lot of questions that go unanswered on the front page, some of my own, some of others, and I'm really wondering - when the community is going through the index page to take time off their hands to pick questions to answer... what do you like for?

Answer 1

I look at the tags and the title before going into the question. If it already has an accepted answer, I just go in to see what the answer was.

Unfortunately, I can only help on programming questions in C, C++, C#, Java, Lua and Python. For engines, I can only help on DirectX, OpenGL and GLES, and not on XNA, Cocos, Unity or libgdx, which are very popular right now. That pretty much leaves me out of around 90% of the questions in this site.

Answer 2

I look for whether it's a topic that interests me. That means the question has to be specific enough to let me know what it's about, but not so localised that the answer is only of use to the asker.

Examples using your own questions:

• 'Creating a level editor event system' is too vague for me to be interested and it contains multiple sub-questions which make it a less appealing question to try and answer. If it were clearer what exactly you're trying to achieve and less about worries that may or may not be actual problems, it would probably be interesting.

• 'Creating a frozen bubble clone' seems to be about finding a bug in your code rather than something that will be of use to the wider community. It might work better if it was clearer what the exact problem was, and if the title of the question actually described the problem rather than the project.

In fact, both of these are examples where your question was not a question but a description of the application you're working on. That gives a real impression that the question is likely to be ill-defined, vague, or localised. Consider ensuring that every question can be summarised with a one sentence question, with the main body elaborating on the details of what you're doing, what you're seeing, and how that differs from what you want to see.

Answer 3

This is what the favourite/ignored tags are for.

This is the quickest way to highlight questions on topics I know.

Answer 4

I answer questions in 2 main situations:

1) The title from the front page catches my eye, or I think I know the answer to the question just from the title

2) I think I have something to add to the discussion of a question I am interested in seeing the answer to