Advice on getting users to use the post template

Hi,

We have a community where people come for help and advice on our product. We have many new, transient users. In order to help them ask good questions, we have templates in several of the categories. Here’s one:

Unfortunately, I see this text far more often than I should. E.G.:

I.E. the user puts the entirety of the question in the title & hits ‘submit’ with no further context or background information.

It’s tempting to say such low quality posts should be ignored - problem solved! But these are very often brand new users and rather than penalizing them for not knowing the social rules (maybe they think they’re being efficient rather than cryptic?) I’d like to create a “pit of success” environment where they’re naturally led to giving enough information that people can help them.

Obviously this particular post template isn’t doing it. So…

  • Are we doing it wrong?
  • Is there a way to not count the template text in the min-chars-to-post test?
  • Should we be supplementing the template somehow?
  • …?

 
Thx,
Ann

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