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As a newcomer on the site (just joined 3 days ago), it took me several hours of roaming around to accidentally find this very useful bird's eye view of FAQs on Meta: FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions and Reference Answers It also took me a while to think of searching through tags of topics I am interested in.

When clicking "Ask a Question" on the main ethereum.stackexchange.com, a window pops us that says "Is your question about Ethereum, the decentralized application platform and smart contract enabled blockchain? We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed. Provide details. Share your research. If your question is about this site, ask it on meta instead."

Could you perhaps add a couple of lines and links (before "Provide details") to the effect of: Before asking your question, please look up keywords (top right box), relevant tags, and this FAQ page to make sure your question has not already been answered. If it hasn't, provide details about the challenge you face. Share your research etc..."

Or does anyone have better ideas for how to support newcomers to find existing answers to their questions, and avoid unknowingly duplicating?

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Thanks for bringing this up again, I totally forgot about that project. The idea was to integrate these FAQ into the help pages. Got to sticky this somewhere. :)

Regarding the guidance-box on the right when asking a new question: This feature you suggested already exists, if I understand you correctly. As soon as you insert a title and add tags and a body, it keeps suggesting similar questions. I think this is a very good way to prevent duplicate posts.

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  • I've only asked 2 questions so I forgot that a list of similar questions pops up under the title bar when you write a post! I just tried it, and I agree that's a great way of limiting the duplicating. But I don't think that folding the FAQ page under the help page will be as effective as (1) a direct link to that page in the box OR (2) actively prompting newcomers to look up "community guidelines" + faqs on the Help page. Unless people actually struggle with sthg, they might not think of clicking on "Help." I didn't realize all that was there until you drew my attention to that page.
    – Tesa
    Commented May 30, 2017 at 14:47
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We can't edit "How to Ask" but we are able to add a link to the FAQ to https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic and this has been done.

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  • The OP asked for a more visible link to a page with info like what is on this page: FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions and Reference Answers. It is a page with information that a beginner in blockchain/Ethereum might need to know to get started. The ethereum.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic page does not give that sort of information.
    – Ajoy Bhatia
    Commented Jun 4, 2018 at 16:33
  • Oh, just saw the link on that page. You meant that the link has been added on the page at that location. I thought you meant that that page itself has the FAQ information.
    – Ajoy Bhatia
    Commented Jun 4, 2018 at 21:43

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