That’s a lot of questions, and most of them happen to have answers. While the ROS community generally does a good job of answering questions the number of answered questions has been on a steady decline for quite awhile. If you get a second and want to help out the community take a moment to look at the unanswered questions list. Maybe you can make someone’s day by helping them fix a problem. I also want to give a shout to @gavanderhoorn@smac who have been doing quite a bit of work delivering answers to ROS users in need. We need everyone to do their part to make answers.ros.org sucessful.
I have the impression that this is partly due to the fact that we see a lot of duplicates being posted on ROS Answers. These are not just posted by new users, but also by already registered ones (ros-infrastructure/answers.ros.org#107). Either those get closed immediately by moderators (and personally I also delete them), or by the poster.
It’s unclear to me whether closed questions also count towards Unanswered questions (DLu/ros_metrics#13). Perhaps @DLu could clarify.
An additional source of duplicates would appear to be newcomers not using the search (either because it doesn’t work for them, because they don’t know it’s there or because they would want to search, but don’t know which search terms to use). It would be great if we could improve the search somehow to avoid these (ros-infrastructure/answers.ros.org#155). @tfoote: would it be possible to get some improvements done on ROS Answers/Askbot which would help with this?
Not to say that the Answered ratio has not been going down, but it might not be as bad as it seems right now.
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