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Images can be an okay way to illustrate something, but I think it is widely agreed that the image should be only an enhancement. If it describes something the text does not, the question is badly done. This is true of probably all Stack Exchange sites, but especially here where copying code is a common way to help debug a problem.

I just came across a question that has no text whatsoever; it is just a picture. In addition, the user is under 10 reputation, so it's not even an embedded picture; it's a link. Could the SO bot spot these and refuse them with an alert message to the asker?

Screenshots:

image-only question raw


image-only question formatted

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    The real issue here is that we only require 30 characters to post a question period. This is actually an 80-column line of text, a full 50 characters longer than it'd have needed to be to get posted without the image.
    – Shog9
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 2:30
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    Does this happen really often enough to make it worth implement a special rule for this ?
    – Walfrat
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 8:27
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    markup-wise, it's closer to a link-only than to an image-only post
    – Cœur
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 8:32
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    Down vote. Vote to close. There's many ways to avoid the question filters and no reason to think this is an important case to single out.
    – dave
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 8:46
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    @dave But it should be "trivial" to catch. And if this is fixed there would be many - 1 cases to avoid it. To get down to zero you need to work on all of them not some. Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 8:50
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    I agree with @dave I posted here a reference to a question where the user posted links in the following style: http*s://i.sstatic.net/oRVRL.jpg to "trick" the system. My comment was deleted, and so was that question, but the amount of junk questions like this that I see all the time is frustrating
    – Alon Eitan
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 8:51
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    How about educating the noob so they will not do it again?
    – mplungjan
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 11:38
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    images and url's should not contribute to the character total to avoid these kind of questions Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 11:38
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    @mplungjan You can hardly educate someone to care.
    – Siguza
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 11:39
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    @mplungjan How do you suggest we do that? Usually they post this "wye dis not working?" question, and disaapear for a month or two immediately after they posted their thing
    – Alon Eitan
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 11:43
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    I post: Welcome to SO. Please visit the help center to see what and how to ask. HINT: Post effort and code about 10 times a day. Most mend their ways - some thank me
    – mplungjan
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 11:45
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    @TheLethalCoder there would be many ? I don't see that kind that much often. Do we have some stats ? It's true that if it could spare some closes votes would could go on others post. But considering this one added a space to the title, he woulc have added some "hello, please help me" to get around the limitation. In the end I don't think it would have change something
    – Walfrat
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 13:16
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    @KevinKloet In this case the OP would have just needed to not make all of the text in their question a link. It wouldn't really have forced them to add more text.
    – BSMP
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 15:43
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    Eww, and it's even a giant full-screen screenshot. Well, now we at least know what OS and browser the OP uses, what their screen size is, what their hobbies include and which college they attend. Commented Apr 5, 2017 at 12:11
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    @sohaiby At least three major compilers disagree with that :-D Commented Apr 6, 2017 at 12:19

1 Answer 1

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Unfortunately, even if we put in a filter to stop users from posting such image-only questions, they could trivially get around it just by adding a paragraph or two of blather about how they're new to programming and really need help and oh god their assignment is due tomorrow and lots of thanks in advance please help me make sense of this. And most would, because it's still easier for them than transcribing or summarizing the content of the image.

In fact, most "image-based questions" that I see on SO and other SE sites already do contain at least a few paragraphs of text — it's just that key parts of the actual question are included as a screenshot or, more often, a scan or a photo of an assignment sheet or a textbook page. (Here's a fairly typical example that I recently ran into while fixing broken images on security.SE. That one isn't even a particularly bad one — but still, without the text in the image, it would be completely unanswerable.)

I don't see any good way to automatically block such questions without also blocking an excessive number of false positives. Sure, SE probably could e.g. train an image classifier to detect images of scanned text, but sometimes people do legitimately need to include such images in questions.

The real solution would be to train regular users to downvote, close-vote and/or flag such questions as very low quality. And the first step towards doing that would probably be to get some text into the official help center pages clearly saying that such questions really are bad. Off the top of my head, I might suggest something like the following:

Posts should be self-contained as far as practically possible. Do not rely on links to external sites for content that could be included, quoted or paraphrased in the post itself. Do not use images of text (e.g. screenshots or scans of printed pages) for material that could instead be directly typed into the post; text in images cannot be easily searched for, and it can be hard or impossible to read for users with impaired vision. While carefully used links and images can enhance a post or provide information that cannot be conveyed by other means, posts that only consist of links or images are not considered useful, and may be downvoted, closed or even deleted.

I'm not sure which section that should go under; we don't seem to have any help center page specifically for proper use of images. Maybe we should? Or maybe some condensed version of that should just go under the general question / answer quality guidelines.

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    Users are bound to get around whatever restrictions are there; if someone is determined to do it the easy way and ignore all rules, that's what will happen. I agree with you there. I believe it's pointless to try to stop that with a robot, but I think there are some people who are willing to improve, but don't realize that a picture should not be used. I've left comments before about changing a picture to text, and the OP does it I'd say more often than not. As for false positives, I'm taking about a post with nothing but an image. Could that possibly be okay?
    – zondo
    Commented Apr 5, 2017 at 13:10
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    The question should be understandable without the picture, so just changing the minimum characters allowed not to include images will get the same false positives as they get now, but more correct ones.
    – zondo
    Commented Apr 5, 2017 at 13:12
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    Educate the users to downvote/close-vote sounds good. But given that this got through Triage and then through H&I, we have a LONG way to go! Commented Apr 5, 2017 at 13:24
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    "The real solution would be to train regular users to downvote, close-vote and/or flag such questions as very low quality." - I post comments for them to post their actual code rather than an image of it. More times than none do they respond or modify the question. When they get downvoted, they start whining about it; hey, they've been asked. I've never flagged those, but given what's been said here, I might just start flagging those as low-quality after I've asked them nicely. Q: If the question doesn't get updated at some point because of the flag(s), does it eventually get deleted? Commented Apr 6, 2017 at 14:50
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    @S.L.Barth flags for suspension on the queue ... sighs
    – Braiam
    Commented Apr 6, 2017 at 20:27

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