What did you do?
I made a free thing.
It's not specifically targeted at Stack Overflow, or at the other Stack Exchange websites, but I made the thing because I wanted to use it on Stack Overflow. I'm posting it here because you can use it on SO, as well as every other SE site that exists or may exist in future.
What is this free thing?
It is essentially a quick and dirty way to give other users detailed information on why you downvoted their post and what could be done to improve them, in a nice and informative way.
How does this free thing work?
Simply put, you paste a URL in a comment on a post you have downvoted. The URL points to a page of the website that contains detailed information about why you downvoted:
- Why you downvoted the post
- Why this is something worth a downvote
- What the user can do to fix the problem
- Instructions on how they can gather information and update their post
Simply drop the URL of one of the site's pages that match your downvote reason into a comment.
How is this even possible?
What, it's just a website. Nothing revolutionary going on here.
OH. You mean "how is it even possible you could already cover every single reason to downvote, along with all the detailed info to fix the situation, for every website on the internets that has downvotes"? Well, I'll tell you. The website is hosted on GitHub.io, backed by a GitHub repository. The idea is that, through collaborative editing, a nice healthy selection of pages may be accumulated over time.
How would that work?
In simplest form, someone wishing to add a downvote reason could create an issue in the repository with details about the page they want to add. Or they can fork, add the page, and then send me a pull request. There is a contributing guide as well as a post template to help making new pages easy.
edited as the site went through a reboot
