How to deal with my unanswered questions?

Question

There are few questions i asked but did not get answers, what is the best procedure to deal with it ? re-posting , re-editing , etc .

Answer 1

In your case editing could make a lot of difference, yes. You've posted quite an amount of good questions and of course quite a set of answers as well. However, I do also see a lot of room for improvement.

For instance, if you look at this question then we will immediately see that you have not taken the time to capitalize your post or even the title. You paste a link to the paper, but you don't indicate the title of the paper. If there are mistakes made then they are possibly implementation or calculation mistakes, but there are no equations given, and no adequate followup on comments, making it impossible to answer the question.

To post a good question then it is imperative that you review your question as if you would be a reader. Lure the readers in with relevant information, make the question easy on the eye.

Editing the question may take it to the front page again, especially if it leads to an upvote or two. Adding enough well read tags may also have an influence even though many users will read about every question asked.

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Other times your questions don't make too much sense to me, for instance this one where you ask how the packet size influences the (maximum?) key stream size produced on a stream cipher. That's of course reverse reasoning: the stream size should limit the packet size.

Besides that, the maximum key stream size would very much depend on the crypt-analysis of a stream cipher; there is no mode of operation to deal with after all. So you'd expect it to be present in the algorithm specification or analysis of the cipher. Any hint to how the protocol chooses / configures the cipher seems to be missing from the question, making it impossible to answer for persons not knowing Zigbee.

So such a question is hard to answer especially since it seems to mix a deeper understanding of the subject with obvious deficiencies on the subject at the same time. This is where I commonly go wrong with my questions as well, especially when they are math related :|

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Finally, this site consists entirely of volunteers. Possibly one or two lucky guys have a job where they get payed for participating. However, there is no rule that questions must get answers, even if they are perfectly fine. Some questions simply do not get answers because:

1. the answer is not directly known to the users;
2. the answer requires signficiant research for which the time is lacking;
3. the question simply gets overlooked

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Personally, I think that questions often get overlooked as the front page mainly shows questions that receive attention rather than the latest questions asked. I always try to get to the latest questions page immediately after getting to the home page, but I can see that other users may not do that, leaving some questions out of sight and out of mind. I'll leave it to you to think of ways around that.

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Re-posting the same question should not be undertaken. Feel free to ask advice in the side channel of course if you're not certain why a question doesn't seem to get the attention that it should.

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As for another example of a badly asked question, see your question above:

• the title: you ask about your unanswered questions, this is not apparent from the title; you've also misspelled "unanswered" (fixed);
• you didn't link to the questions that didn't receive enough attention, so we have to look up ourselves;
• you didn't capitalize or space your post to the best of your abilities;
• you only included the discussion tag, not even including the unanswered-questions, which might mean that you also didn't take the time to read the Q/A related to that (although currently there are none other than yours, so that would make a pretty quick read on this site) (fixed).