What if yahoo banned 'what if' questions?

Hmmm... so perhaps we, as a ''community'' can act to police our own little areas. Like, by encouraging people to avoid responding to the silly questions (''Don't feed the trolls!'')

A novel concept (and one that doesn't seem to have 100% effectiveness in *any* case), but certainly one to consider.

Yes, we get a lot of irritating questions. The old-timers sigh in annoyance - but fortunately, there is almost always a small herd of newbies that are eager to demonstrate their own knowledge of cabbages and kings that can apply their own wit, intelligence, or determination (or lack of the same) to these questions.

They shouldn't be banned - just automatically dumped in a category entitled "Sad Losers With No Life and Even Less Common Sense"

Would that be a red cabbage or a green cabbage? And where would cauliflower fit into all this?

I never open these "questions" let alone answer them. The proposed change is almost always something physically impossible, obviously so to anyone with even a bit of high school physics. However, I guess most of the kids asking questions here haven't got to high school yet!

[Edit] Elifino has summarized typical Y!A questions nicely, but omitted my particular bugbear: The question that isn't a question, forcing you to open the question to find out the real question in the "Additional Details".

What if questions can actually be good questions, but of course there's always some idiotic ones. If they banned it the person can easily rephrase their question and ask it again. So my point is there will always be ignorant questions, be the bigger man and just not respond to them because that's exactly what they want, and for some reason everyone responds to it so they just ask more and more. So get over it and ignore it.

It's up to the answerers whether they want to waste time with a question. In my experience the great majority of them aren't worth reading.

In fact an awful lot of them fall into one of a few categories:

-Here's a homework problem. I haven't started thinking about it yet, nor have I opened my book. Solve it for me. 10 points!

-Please type the following question into google for me and tell me what comes up.

-Is my "theory" (which is some combination of paranoid, rambling, ill-defined, ungrammatical, immediately self-contradictory, and of course not a proper theory at all) valid?

-Please write a book chapter and send it to me. (e.g. "What is quantum mechanics?")

-Is there any truth to this paranormal/alien/end-of-the-world story that I read on the internet?

-"What if" questions where the counterfactual is nonsensical or logically inconsistent. (e.g. What if 2 were equal to 5? Then how many ducks would live in Los Angeles?)

-Well-supported theory X is hard for poorly-educated people to believe. Therefore it's wrong. Dare to debate me, sinner!

and, of course:

-obvious trolls.

One learns to recognize these quickly and skip past them. Though I admit, sometimes I'll answer a troll knowing it's a troll because I think my answer is funnier than their question.

Anyway, short answer: Let people ask whatever they want. If answerers want to waste their time, that's their problem.

I don't mind them if they represent scenarios that can reasonably be analyzed. For example, "What if a microscopic black hole were to hit the earth at high speed," or something like that.

I would much rather see MULTIPLE CHOICE questions banned. I would bet 99.9% of those are posted by students trying to cheat on their homework or cheat on an unproctored test. They're unethical and they waste our time.

Eh... depends on the question. Some are valid, some are not.

"What if Einstein was a woman" "What if Oswald had missed Kennedy" - conjecture is part of our scientific process; and, you don't *have* to answer them if you choose not to.

Agree with you, but "what if" the question is a sensible one.

"What if I became a 10000 foot gaint, and drank petrol!" - Yeaaaa, those questions are fully retard...

Then your question would not exist.