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If you go to Unanswered Questions you'll see several highly voted questions that seem like no one will ever post an answer to. The top one, because someone answered it on MO already. The second one, because the user sort of has already answered it themselves in the comments. Are we doomed to forever view these same answers at the top of the page? That doesn't seem like the original intention of Unanswererd questions. Could we put a sticky dropdown menu for re-ordering that page?

At the current rate of things, we will see the exact same questions on that page in 6 months. I don't think the site is meant to host someone's personal, arcane question at the top permanently. This is a bug.

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  • $\begingroup$ Why is there a "no answers" sub-tab in the "unanswered" tab? Also in the "votes" sub-tab there are some answers which actually have an answer. $\endgroup$
    – Sahiba Arora
    Jan 13, 2018 at 10:58
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    $\begingroup$ @SahibaArora Questions are marked as unanswered if they have no upvoted answers. So there can be unanswered questions with answers, so it also makes sense to filter on questions without answers whatsoever. $\endgroup$
    – JAD
    Jan 15, 2018 at 10:36

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There are already tabs to see unanswered questions in a different way than having the most highly voted one on top, such as to have the newest first.

On the front page, not the question page, select the unanswered tab and then refine.

If you want something more specific you can use the search feature.

The remark that the list is in part topped by questions that are not really unanswered is somewhat orthogonal. You could resolve it, for those where this is the case, by providing an (community-wiki) answer, for example.

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    $\begingroup$ One issue here is that newest unanswered questions page looks very much like the newest questions page. I think what OP has in mind would be an option to filter the unanswered question of the last month/week by highest vote. $\endgroup$
    – Hyperplane
    Jan 8, 2018 at 21:15
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    $\begingroup$ For example I asked a well received question yesterday. 10 upvotes and 8 favourites almost immediately. But now, a mere 24h later it's already drowned in the noise and you won't find it anywhere on the site. $\endgroup$
    – Hyperplane
    Jan 8, 2018 at 21:21
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    $\begingroup$ As I said, using search one can find such things. For example if you want recent, not answered questions with a decent score, search isanswered:no score:5 and order the search results by newest or active. Maybe I should expand my answer to highlight this more. (Sidenote: isanswered:no is only near identical to the unanswered tab; to have a still closes match isanswered:no hasaccepted:no can be used.) $\endgroup$
    – quid Mod
    Jan 8, 2018 at 22:16
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    $\begingroup$ To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if even a lot of senior members are not aware of this feature (I wasn't). From my perspective, that of a naïve user, it seems as bit arbitrary that all three of these tabs (A , B, C) have very different filter buttons. It seems like for example time frame day/week/month/all could just be a convenient drop down box for all of them. But I'm no web designer so I guess there is some logic behind it that I'm not getting. $\endgroup$
    – Hyperplane
    Jan 8, 2018 at 22:26
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    $\begingroup$ Yes, I agree, on both. There may be some performace concerns and issues of not making things to "busy looking" yet, eg, I do not see why there could not be a "week" tab in "unanswered" too. But I also know some users that do use such approaches to finding questions. A more simple approach would be to just start looking from the say fifth page of unanswered questions (by newest) on (which is about 12h in the past). This would avoid most of the routine homework type stuff. Or look at say 7th to 10th page for yesterdays unanswered questions (roughly). (This is based on 50q/page view). $\endgroup$
    – quid Mod
    Jan 9, 2018 at 0:21
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    $\begingroup$ @quid is there a list of such search commands (like isanswered, score, hasaccepted) anywhere? It would be quite helpful to know where to find them. I don't know whether this is supposed to be common knowledge. $\endgroup$
    – user279515
    Jan 10, 2018 at 17:41
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    $\begingroup$ @Brahadeesh see math.stackexchange.com/help/searching Moreover after you perform a search on the list of results there'll be a line on the right "advanced search tips"; clicking it will display much but not all of that information on that page. $\endgroup$
    – quid Mod
    Jan 10, 2018 at 18:11

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