The site's availability to newcomers seems startlingly low

Question

I'm new to this site and to RPG Stackexchange where I have been spending my time so far. I only have a moderate experience with DND and most of my friends have none. I've been looking for a reliable site to ask DND questions for months and when I stumbled onto this site I thought it was a godsend. However, upon joining, I've been having a little difficulty getting what I want out there as a newcomer.

1. The tour and question guide give very general rules on how to write your questions, despite requiring them to be specific themselves.

2. you cannot reply to a moderators editing or deletion of your comment, and no private message system is available to speak to them about it.

3. Very little advice is forthcoming on how to improve your questions. They often get put on hold or removed with no explanation of how to fix them besides "make it specific and follow the rules". If you don't know how to do this... there aren't really any ways to to make progress in the right direction.

4. Most people joining this site are going to have questions and want to answer other peoples questions in an attempt to help them. Your answers and questions getting deleted and then resulting in a question ban make it incredibly hard to improve your own abilities. If someone's answer isn't quite as good as someone else's, downvoting and deletion are a lot more punishing for attempting to help someone than if someone were trolling or being of no help at all.

Is there any way to reduce the barrier of entry on such a useful site that seems so unfriendly to new faces?

A good example is recently one of my answers got deleted by a moderator named Seven Sided Die (10k link). He didn't do this for any malicious reason. I had replied to a question early and the question was then put on hold because the moderators wanted the question asker to edit the question to be more clear without just taking my answer and going with it for the sake of clarity. However, the person may never fix their question, or they may fix it in a way that invalidates my answer. I'm fine with this, but since Seven deleted it rather than asking me to, I lost 6 Reputation. Now, since Seven has over one-hundred thousand rep, this wouldn't seem like a big deal to him, however, since I had 19 at the time, this dropped my score back to 13, meaning I could no longer upvote answers or reply to protected questions. This is fairly serious to me, because I like being able to show support to good answers while I browse the site. Something I can't do until I regain that rep I lost through more answers that could lose me rep, questions that could get me account-locked, or waiting for the person to hopefully edit their question so I can get it back. This is a brutal up-hill climb for self-reliance when new people join the site.

Answer 1

RPG.SE can be daunting to a newcomer especially one with expectations set by forums, Reddit, etc. To address your points in order...

1. The tour and help center by their nature can only give general guidance. It's expected that a new user might read some other questions on the site and learn by example what a good question looks like. It's really the only way to do it - imagine if we tried to provide "question templates" and 100 pages of requirements documentation on how to write a question, would that really help?

2. You can reply - either in a comment on your question/answer, or, as you have correctly detected, here on Meta, in public. SE does not and will never have a PM system because issues are for the entire community, not just mods. We all share powers here, and the more rep you have the more powers you have - there are very few powers the three diamond mods have that high rep users don't. Discussion of moderation is not something to "talk privately about" with a mod - because it's not personal. It's users and/or mods trying to keep the site great.

3. Sometimes there's more advice given unsolicited and sometimes there's not. Feel free and ask. I know I personally don't always have the time to do so and I need to place on hold and run, trusting that the rest of the community will fill the gap. And you have to understand, a lot of the time a new user will post something pretty incoherent and then never return, never seeing or responding to the litany of helpers, so sometimes we kinda wait for a user to show interest in bothering to improve before really piling on.

4. It shouldn't make it hard. You can edit your own content, even deleted content, and flag for undeletion. On hold and deletion do NOT stop the learning process, they are part of it - only you giving up and stopping can make it the end of the story. Downvotes and deletion are not punishment but they are guidance.

In the end, there are 1000 sites that work on the principle of "post anything you want and only really egregious stuff will be edited or deleted or locked." We don't need 1001. The reason you can get such great, comprehensive answers to questions without all the noise is because we take the opposite approach to our format. That means that not everyone will be comfortable with the format - and that's OK.

As for the rep system, there's thousands of posts here and on Meta.SE discussing all of its ins and outs. But the bottom line is yes, we want people to prove they can ask and answer questions in the SE way before they get much in the way of other powers. How do we know you know what a good question is? How do we know you're going to make good edits, close/reopen for the right reasons? You earn that trust via site participation. You're new and what this rep dynamic is telling you is "you don't quite get it yet." Once you get the SE way a bit more, you'll get the abilities as well. So keep at it. It's not super easy and it can't and shouldn't be if we don't want to be just another 4chan/reddit/rpg.net/other place many of us can't stomach wading through when what we want is real gaming information for real gamers.

Answer 2

What you observe has been a concern to the community at RPG.SE for some time. For a sampling of concerns about climate here, you can take a look at these meta discussions and see that there has been some effort to address this:

• Has Role-Playing Games Stack Exchange lost its appeal?
• Voting on Subjective Answers
• Why people are being so rude?
• This sites methode of doing it's rating is so hostile should i bother to stay with it?

Based on the SE model, there is only so much that can be done.

A core problem is cultural. The base model, before the RPG site was added, is that of a flesh based sorting algorithm, or "whatever the crowd thinks is right, once the different answers are presented for consideration."

Reaching consensus is messy, particularly when opinions get tossed into the mix. If consensus is to work, inputs and options require expert or informed opinion, not just an opinion. SO/SE started in the programming world, with all of the cultural flaws that part of our world possesses.

The other point is: asking a good question that is answerable with a "best" choice is an art. There is, in this world, such a thing as a bad question, a stupid question, and in many cases a question that isn't presented in a way that a best answer can be recognized.

Don't worry, hang in there, and ask the best questions you can. Chances are, someone else has the same question. If you have an answer that you can support, either through experience or documentation, and logical presentation, it will attract support.