Background: Today, I decided to try and re-join SO to answer questions... And immediately, on the very first question I found, I was forced to revert to my old pattern: posting a frequently required [comment of](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23586177/issues-with-a-perl-program#comment36201736_23586177):

> 
> "issues with a program" isn't really enough information to help you. The correct way to describe the issues is: **(1) Input data; (2) Your actual output; (3) The output you EXPECT that differs from #2; (4) Any error messages you get** (I was pleasantly surprised that the user posted their code :))
> 
> 
> 

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Therefore, my proposal is to follow a good UX design paradigm - **when you need people to provide N separate chunks of information, use a separate form field for each chunk**.

More specifically, **for new users only** - say those with less than 50 rep OR with less than 3 questions with +2 votes each - **require their questions to SO to be posted via a form that has 6 different fields** instead of one textarea:

1. Problem you are trying to solve
2. Code you tried to solve it
3. Specific issue you have with running your code 

(A good design would be multiple choice option "compile error"/"runtime error"/"no output"/"incorrect output" + text area)
4. Specific input you give to your code
5. Specific expected behavior/output you expect from your code
6. Exact output/behavior you get from your code, and how it differs from #5

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***Benefits***

This would solve 2 distinct use cases, each of which results in poor quality SO questions:

1. User who doesn't know yet how to ask a good question. The form would provide that guidance to them. 

This would have two benefits

	* we would get more good and less bad questions, by requiring posters to learn what parts are needed for a good question as an integral part of asking it
	* **and** we would have less bad feelings on all sides from "well, I get treated badly for simply not knowing the intricacies of asking good questions" from well intentioned but poorly informed newbies, who are denigrated via "your question is crap" from well intentioned but tired of volumes of crap old timers.
2. Help vampires, who simply don't care.

Those would either (hopefully) be fully repelled by the added barrier of needing to fill out more than a zero-effort freeform text box; OR would drastically simplify the task of detecting and DVing/VTCing their questions as evidenced by crap in most of the required fields.