Question

Seriously, why do people ask a question with no question in it? For example, I've seen questions liek this...
"Help!"
"I need some help, please."
"Can someone read my essay (no essay included, of course)?"

Please, just post the ENTIRE question, so we can answer it. If you need someone to proofread a 3 page paper, well, maybe this is not the place for that.

Answer 1

They're just trolls. Ignore them.

Answer 2

Generally agree with ignoring them. That said, we're discussing ways that we might be able to mitigate some of that via question/asker ratings or some such mechanism. Don't hold your breath though, we're still in the `talking about how we're doing it' stage, not in the `actually building it' stage :)

As a side note, some psychology -- the people who don't actually ask their questions probably get more clicks on them, and it's not unlikely that they also tend to get more answers (because once you've clicked on the question, you've passed a psychological barrier to enter it, so if you know the answer, you may be more likely to actually reply because it's a little easier to do so). But we have zero actual evidence of that, just suggesting it :)

Answer 3

It also helps to write a reply like "I'm not sure what you're asking. Can you expand?" Then someone else in the group will give the response a medal and the non-question gets marked as answered, therefore going away.

IMHO, I don't see a pressing need to address the non-questions because there are existing strategies to deal with it (as I outlined above). If someone consistently is posting annoying stuff, then you can "report abuse." So that's a second method to deal with them. I suppose the third strategy is to ignore them. Trifecta!

Answer 4

Yes, I've also come across many such questions.