How do we encourage question askers to be engaged with their questions?

Question

It seems like a fairly common thing for somebody to ask an unanswerable-with-information-provided question and then "go away" and not respond to comments with questions or tentative ideas.

I'm wondering if there is something that we could do to encourage the OP to respond – basically some way to set the expectation that asking a question places a burden on us to try and respond, but also on the OP to reply to the responses. Burden isn't quite the right word here, but I think it gets the sense across.

Answer 1

I think you've just defined the core problem of the site. If someone isn't interested in participating with the process of defining the problem so that we can help solve the problem, there's not a lot you can do to change that.

If, however, the person is engaged but maybe doesn't have enough background to know what they don't know, there's an easy way to keep that person engaged:

Be nice.