What can I do to improve my question so it gets some attention?

Question

I wanted to draw attention on that question. That's why I put a graph, I tried to format it properly, edit it and add a comment, but I failed. Why? What else could I improve?

Using TimeSeriesForecast for forecasting the traffic growth

Answer 1

Another thing to keep in mind is that your question should be helpful to others, not just to you. Ask about a very specific problem that's interesting to you, but no one else, and you'll be ignored. Generalize your question to something a lot of people stumble upon frequently, and you'll get noticed. People also tend to get more reputation points for answering these questions, so you'll get better answers, too.

A somewhat unfortunate corollary is that "tutoring" questions where someone is basically needs assistance learning MMA often don't get much attention: There are >100 questions containing the words "excel" and "import", if none of them were helpful to you, how likely is it that answers to your question will be helpful to anyone else?

Answer 2

The best things you could do to get attention are:

1. Explain what problem you are trying to solve.
2. Show how you have applied Mathematica to the problem thus far. You should include actual code. If the computation is complex, you should isolate the problem area in a simplified version of your computation and present the simplified code in your question, not the full code. The more extraneous material you remove the better.
3. Describe how/why your current efforts have failed or dissatisfied you.

Answer 3

A good way is to describe as clearly as possible what exactly your problem is. If people don't understand what you need, they'll not be able to answer.

Proper formatting certainly is helpful, but cannot make up for deficits in the content.

A graph helps if and only if it helps in understanding your question.

Adding a comment doesn't draw anyone's attention to the question, unless it's the answer to another comment, in which case the author of the comment you are replying to is notified (if your comment doesn't follow immediately to the comment you answer, to notify the comment's author of your reply, make sure to include @username in your comment (where username is the user name of the comment's author; for example if you reply to a comment by me, use @celtschk). Note that a person addressed with @username is only notified if there's a prior comment of that person (or that person is the author of the question/answer the comment is attached to, but that person is notified even without the @username).