Forum:Any Way To "Bump" A Previous Post?

Question

[jobinv]

Usually, when I post a question on Biostar, there's someone helpful who either comments or answers the question. Very occasionally though, a question (for example Interpreting counts in a tabular file posted by me) doesn't get any reaction whatsoever. I am never sure about whether this is because nobody knows the answer (which I find unlikely), or because I perhaps formulated myself in a very convoluted manner (much more likely), or because my question is too specific to my particular case that it wouldn't really help anyone but myself - thus leaving little incentive for a collaborative community to put effort into answering it (also possible). A very real possibility is also that so many questions were asked immediately afterwards that my question moved onto later pages before the "right" people got to see it, which leads me to ask the following question: what are people's opinions about "bumping" an unanswered question to the top again? If this is not an unacceptable practice, what would be the best way to do this?

Let me emphasize that I do not mean to suggest by this that I'm feeling "entitled" to an answer to any question that I post. I am fully aware that the people who answer are indeed doing this out of their own kindness, and I have all the respect and appreciation in the world for that.

[Damian Kao]

I like the bounty system where if a post doesn't receive any answers/comments for a couple of days, an extra option opens up for the author where s/he can set a bounty on the post. Person who correctly answers this question will now receive extra points. This system can be expanded upon by incrementing bounties every couple of days up to a max bounty size if no answers are given. We can make the act of setting the bounty also bump the post.

[jobinv]

I definitely like this idea!

[Istvan Albert]

the bounty system was active back in the days where Biostar ran on the SE platform - it was used only a few times probably once every one thousand questions. Anecdotal evidence suggests having a bounty put on a question did not have much effect, this was about 2 years ago so that needs to be factored in

[Ben]

I know we do bump some old unanswered posts to the front page periodically (not sure of the criteria at play there), but another solution could be a StackOverflow "bounty" system. Seems this was No Bounties In Biostar? in passing a while ago, but it isn't currently listed as a feature request on the biostar github. edit: Ah Damian recommended the same thing while I was searching about.

Answer 1

[Istvan Albert]

Editing a post will move it back to the front page - although editing for the sake of bumping is very much frowned upon and risks post closure.

The feature exists for the exact purpose to be able to repost a question in a different formulation. Some questions are not easy to write the first time around.

My recommendation is that those wishing to bump their question by editing it also make an effort to substantially rework both the title and the content of the post - and usually that means simplifying both.

To comment on your example, the title itself "shRNA study: specialized tools or statistical tests?" is way too complicated and as it turns out somewhat unrelated to the content. You are really looking for methods to interpret counts in a tabular file - that operation is pretty independent on how you got those counts.

But you scare away people from even looking at the body of the post. It title starts with the shRNA word, what is that in the first place, perhaps I should know but forgot? I had to look it up, ah, small hairpin RNA. Then within the question you ask too many subquestions there is something about functional analysis, something about silencing, then something about RNAi and shRNA, then you have a link to a paper, all together these make the whole question too complicated. Answering your question feels like too much effort to even get started. It feels like work, but the truth is that we're here to have fun then help others but not if it means that we have to do a lot of the busy work.

One needs to ask "answerable" questions: questions that are fun and easy to answer if someone knows the answer.

[jobinv]

Thanks for the tip, I've attempted to reformulate my question in an attempt to make it more "answerable".