User blog comment:RansomTime/Assistance Assistance - best practices for helping out on Community Central/@comment-24473195-20160711140742

While this blog is all fine and good, part of the problem is social, and main part is technical. I know there is little Community admins / users can do to improve the technical side of it. But considering that wikia is spending a lot of time and money improving a "discussions" app for mobile, they could at least try and improve the pain points of the desktop discussion.

The biggest problem with community central is actually that the search engine, is horrible, by any standards. Even if someone has just answered a question a few minutes ago, there is no way to surface that answer to someone repeating the exact same question. It may quickly dissapear into the void. So no matter how noble and nice people are, everyone will eventually tire of answering the exact same questions over and over again.

To give an example of improved help, myself and others created a wiki[1] exactly due to the fact that the main site sucked at providing help (they have somewhat improved it). The wiki has more than 10 pages with FAQs, and a lot of links directing users to it. My personal policy is that whenever someone asks a question that is probably a FAQ, if it is on the same page, I don't answer the person directly, but instead just amend the page and add it. If it is on a separate page, someone may link to it. This clearly works because currently the FAQs are more popular (despite being a small wiki) than most other pages, and between the help in the main site, and the wiki, people probably get their answers.

The best way in my opinion to help people, is to help them help themselves, spoon feeding will often result in more spoon feeding.