Just to say - for old questions, the details get moved to a comment automatically. It seems to take a while for that to happen, so you may see no comments, and a day later the old details appear as a question comment.

Some questions make no sense without the details. E.g. questions such as: “What is this animal?” with a photograph uploaded by the questioner.

There is no way to fix that by editing the question, no matter what the limit as you can’t put a photograph into a question.

SOLUTION 1: QUESTION DETAILS AS COMMENT, LINK TO COMMENT AS QUESTION SOURCE

The best solution I’ve seen so far is to put the question details in as a comment on the question. Then link to that comment in the source.

You can find the link to the comment by right clicking on the date or time shown below the name of the author of the comment.

You can see how it works with this question - which had a couple of images. Author wanted to know if the animal was a possum.

What is this animal? Is it a possum?

It obviously needed that photo (and their other one) just to make sense of the question.

I rewrote the title to say (see question source) and updated the question source to link to a comment into which I inserted the two photographs which I found from the log (by appending /log to the url)

This is how you find the link to the comment:

This was the result:

What is this animal? Is it a possum? (see question source for photos)

It’s a specially good very simple example of a situation where the question is a natural one that someone will want to ask: “What is this” with some photographs they took of it. All such questions will make no sense without the details. Well this is a way to fix past questions like that and to ask new ones.

Sadly it doesn’t embed the photographs into the question itself, but it’s better than nothing.

For an example involving text, which I have just fixed in the same way, see Are the tenses and punctuation in this English paragraph correct? (See question source)

There are many budding authors and the answers to such questions are important, and you learn by seeing how it is done in specific examples like that.

A general question of the type “how do you punctuate paragraphs” would be too vague to answer.

SOLUTION 2 (NOT RECOMMENDED): ADDING THE DETAILS IN AN ANSWER AND LINKING TO THE ANSWER AS THE QUESTION SOURCE

Of course its awkward to have the photograph on a separate page. I expect those who answer questions like this will start putting copies of the photograph at the head of their answers, resulting in lots of answers with duplicate photos in them.

I did a new question of this type myself, it’s another type of question that just makes no sense at all without an image. You simply can’t ask the question without the image and the image is best put on Quora rather than some external site.

Which Tank will Fill up First (Look closely at details)? (see question source for image)

As you’ll see I duplicated the tank image in my answer to the question.

To help deal with that issue, you could add the image in an answer instead of a comment and link to the answer - it’s slightly abusing the question format. But you could phrase it as an answer as in “This is the photograph from the question. My answer is that it might be a possum, what do you think?”

I think though that they might complain if you have an answer as a question source, I don’t know, but that’s why I’ve said “not recommended”.

Alternatively, just do an answer to your own question with the image or details, to get it started. Even if you don’t know the answer, you can include the image and say you don’t know and that’s why you are asking the question. It will help get it off to a good start.

There are many other questions like that such as “How do I punctuate this paragraph” or “Where am I going wrong in this complex maths reasoning” or “should I buy this product - I’ve been told by friends that it has these flaws (bulleted list) - are they right?”

Indeed many scientific, technical and mathematical questions, questions on medicine, art, poetry, literature, architecture, music etc etc.

I think they should encourage question details of the right sort myself. To find a way to encourage details that are necessary to questions and discourage unnecessary details, though I’m not sure how that’s best achieved.

SOLUTION 3 QUORA BLOG POST

Another solution is to write a blog post. Everyone on quora can start new blogs. Have a question details blog post and put your details there and link to it as the question source. Then it can be as long as you like. It’s like an answer with formatting tools ready to hand (not easily accessible for comments except using copy and paste) but there’s no risk of quora having an issue with it by linking to an answer as a question source - though I don’t know if they will have problems with that as I haven’t tried.

You can combine that with a tentative answer that includes the image, but not linked to as the question source, for questions where that is appropriate.

SOLUTION 4 (NOT RECOMMENDED!) MISUSE OF THE ANSWER WIKI

I’ve also seen some questions where they misuse the answer wiki to embed an image or text so you can see it on the question page. Put the question details at the head of the answer wiki.

It seems likely to me that Quora won’t permit this once they get around to reviewing such questions. It’s a neat solution otherwise as it basically replicates the question details as they were before. Thought I should mention it for completeness.

WHATEVER WORK AROUND YOU DO, BEST DONE ON QUORA AS A COMMENT, (ANSWER?)OR BLOG POST

I think this solution of using a comment on the question as a question source is far far better than trying to create a copy of the question details off site and then linking to that.

RECOMMENDATION - MAKE USE OF EXTENDED 250 CHARACTER LIMIT FOR QUESTIONS

For instance for the possum question:

What is this small grey animal with a pointed nose and arched legs which I spotted outside my home in Australia? Is it a possum? (see question source for photos)

(rephrasing of the question suggested by Tim Bushell)

THIS NEW CHANGE MAKES QUORA VULNERABLE TO LINK ROT AND SPAMMING

I don’t understand the reason for implementing it in quite the way they did. It’s encouraging people who ask questions which need details to create the details off quora on some other platform, e.g. their private blog, or facebook or whatever and link to that as the question source.

The great thing about quora is the way it copies images into answers and questions if you link to an image off site. There’s such a problem of link rot on the web, why encourage people to post links to off wiki sites instead of just putting the image or text into the question details themselves?

It also seems likely to be abused too as you don’t normally have to click through to a link to a site off of quora. It’s very rare that I’ve had to do that to answer a question, even if it’s a youtube video then it is embedded in quora. You could end up on a site that asks you to pay to see the content, or spams you, or a site with pornography, or it could just be that it’s on a social site like facebook and you find you have to join to see the photograph.

After this change, any question that has details, even if it is just a photograph or a paragraph of text or a youtube video will require you to click on a link. The link could go anywhere (unless you look at it carefully to check it is a quora url or a youtube link) just to see what the details are.

It also could take the reader to another Q/A site that permits you to enter the details, like Yahoo Answers or stackexchange etc, so you end up on a different Q/A site and end up reading the answer there instead of on Quora so it could lead to Quora losing customers if that becomes prevalent - and how can they complain if someone does that?

IT’S DETRIMENTAL TO INTERESTING CAREFULLY THOUGHT OUT QUESTIONS

Also as someone who has written many answers - often the most interesting questions to answer are the ones that have details - the author of the question cared enough about their question to go into some more detail about what the question was - or it’s an interesting and complex question that needs details.

For instance a detailed question about some topic in science that is more in depth and doesn’t just ask the obvious newbie questions on the subject. Not just a question you could answer by typing your question into google, but a detailed question that you have to ask an expert in person.

This change favours the sort of question where a decent answer will often be “just search in google”, with less of the detailed questions that can only be asked on places like quora.

So - at any rate this fix to do the details as a comment, and then set the question source as a link to that comment does keep the details on quora and avoids issues of link rot. Why didn’t they do it like this automatically? Could they still, or is it too late?

It’s also a way to ask questions like this in future on Quora.