So I did my usual stuff today and logged onto Pro Webmasters and kinda got thinking about all the Questions that are being marked [CLOSED] and how this would look like to new users of the site.
I'm not sure if everyone would agree but a page front page with 25%-50% topics with [CLOSED] in my honest opinion doesn't look very welcoming to new community members.. This has more and likely been discussed multiple times throughout the meta community but I guess this would be from from stacks that have fewer members than others, which I'll explain more later on, if your sure not what I'm referring too.
There are other ways you could look at this issue and these are on one hand you have people seeing [CLOSED] everywhere so they may be more inclined to read the FAQ before posting but then on the other hand we still regularly receive questions regardless.
So I believe that a page that front page that contains hardly any CLOSED questions would look more welcoming to new community members as well as displaying more results without filtering for returning members. Reverting back to what I said about stacks with fewer community members, basically I imagine this is a common problem with stacks that have fewer members than the big stacks due to the 10K mark which allows users vote delete questions, this was covered here: Is there a way to hide closed or migrated questions?
I saw John's comment but sadly the link that he refers to in the guidelines doesn't exist so I'm unable to comment any further on that. But hopefully john will be able to give us some further insight.
If we can come up with some guidelines as when to delete questions I'm all for clearing them out. This one is probably a good example. – John Conde♦ Feb 16 '11 at 16:19
Now assuming I'm correct and John or any other moderator for that matter doesn't come say this isn't the case I'm assuming we need more 10K users that have the ability to clean up the site via vote deleting 'closed unanswered`.
Sharing the love with an upvote 'with good reason'
So here's the thing at the current rate of the rep being distributed we will not have enough 10K users this time next year which again, I dunno if others agree this put more work for the moderators as well as other things. My proposal is that we are more 'Willing to share the love', by no means am I asking that people go crazy, but if you have a spare moment rather than looking at only unanswered questions take a look at an accepted answer or at least one that has been answered and if you feel that someone has left a good answer and you believe it too be correct then share the love with a up vote as this will help the community as a whole, never-mind give people little fluffy feelings receiving there virtual votes :)
I'm keen to what moderators have to say on this matter and I apologize in an advance if I got how the 10K works wrong, also any comments by the community as usual are welcomed, flame away ;)
