Lack of help

Meta Elastic
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To the elasticsearch professionals,
While I appreciate the links to your published documentation, most people that ask a question in these forums have already read the docs. Frequently the question are "answered" with a doc link and any follow up questions are ignored. I usually only post here if I cannot find an answer in the docs or with a exhaustive google search. Question that are not answered in 30 days should not be closed they should be moved to the top of the "to answer" list.

Thank you,
Brad Kelley

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Hey Brad,

Thanks for raising this issue. It's a known problem, but we don't have a perfect solution unfortunately. A couple of points:

  1. Discuss is, like any other open source / free support, best effort. We're spending a good amount of time on answering questions, but it's one of many tasks and there is no way to make any guarantees.
  2. While we would wish that everybody would research and read the docs first, I'm not sure that this is what most people are doing. If you point out in your question what you have already done (like linking to the right docs page), it will probably help both sides to skip a step.
  3. A reason for not getting an answer could also be that the question is either not very well phrased (missing information, hard to reproduce,...) or simply complicated (it might take more than an hour to answer). While we strive to help as widely as possible, sometimes you need to set priorities — rather helping five people with good questions than just one. It might not be entirely fair, but time is finite and you need to pick your tradeoffs.
  4. Unfortunately Discuss is not as good with solutions as StackOverflow. They really push for answers to be marked as solutions and while Discuss has this feature as well, it's only being used sparingly (which I think is a bit of a platform issue). Thus once you got an initial answer the topic might get stuck before reaching a final solution and it's not really easy to tell.
  5. Once there hasn't been an answer in 30 days the topic is probably not as relevant for the asker any more and we use this for some cleanup. Otherwise we'd end up with a bottomless feed of questions that nobody is really trying to find an answer for any more. If you have the same problem, please open another question.

I hope this helps a bit with the perspective and how to increase your chance of getting an answer.

2 Likes
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most of the time I have success getting what need.
Few time I didn't but then that topic was not importatnt for me so I didn't care

one time my question never got answer. to put thread on top I constantly update for few days with new update and new result and progress of that task. But still not a single reply.
I assume no one in this site knows about it and drop the whole project.

overall very good help

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