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Allow me to introduce myself.

Recently y'all participated in community evaluation, which shows that the quality of your site is consistently high. I personally can't judge your answers (or really the questions), which is actually a pretty good sign. If posts were so simple that an outsider instantly understood them, we'd be worried about quality. Furthermore, Google seems to find your questions when I search for what appears to be key words. So quality looks good on this site.

Most of your other stats look good as well. The one thing that caught my eye has come up here before: answer rate. Phonon's challenge was effective since half of the questions mentioned have been answered. The problem is, even more questions have been asked (a definite good thing) and some of those remain unanswered. I think the experts to answer those questions are here; y'all just ain't organized. ;-)

So I'd like to suggest forming a small group of dedicated users to work at reducing the size of the unanswered queue. Do what you did last time, only set up something a bit more long-term. Other sites have found some success organizing on chat. I don't think you need to create a whole new room, since your chat room is not particularly active. It might even make sense to figure out a good time to host an event in chat (an "Answer Roundup"1?) I'm missing a ton of great ideas, which is why I'm asking here:

How can this site do to bring unanswered questions to justice?

We're really excited about your site and wish you continued success.

  1. I might be pushing the analogy too far.
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The things I try to do to bring unanswered questions to justice are:

  • Answer it myself (if I can).
  • Put a bounty on it (if I'm interested in the answer).
  • Re-word or query the asker for more information if that is required to form a sensible answer.
  • Try to understand why the question has not been answered, and fix that.

If all else fails, then the last option should be to vote to close the question as "off-topic" (or whatever the appropriate reason is).

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    $\begingroup$ This looks like an excellent mental flowchart. I would say that jumping to closing a question sooner may be profitable in many cases. If the question is difficult to answer because the OP failed to include enough detail or was not sufficiently clear, it might be best to put the onus back on the asker to get their question reopened through an edit. Otherwise, answers might answer the wrong question. ;-) But if you are able to one of the other actions, so much the better. $\endgroup$
    – Jon Ericson
    Aug 23, 2013 at 23:29

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