How to encourage users to post search-engine friendly content?

Question

There have been a number of questions recently 0, 1, 2 and 3 which all contain largely screenshots (at the time of this writing). However, while some of the screenshots have merit in that they show valuable information such as settings or bits and pieces of disassembly in the IDA graph view, several of them have no value added by appearing as images rather than text.

On Meta.SO a related topic already exists, as Igor pointed out to me.

Now, we all know that search engines are still not really as good at indexing images as they are at indexing text. So for future visitors coming via a search engine, it would definitely be beneficial to have the textual form in place of the screenshots.

How can we nudge our community members to post more search-engine friendly content?

And in this particular case, how - aside from comments (which didn't yield any results as of yet) - can we convey it to this community member?

Answer 1

I think the only way is to present OP with the benefits of posting text instead of images. One would be that this way it's easier for those that answering to use that text when building an answer.

It might be also presented as one of the factor for getting any answers at all (people are lazy - make it easy for them to answer your question).

As for how to convey this message? It could be an info message in the image editor (not sure if SE has any extensibility points). If not it should be in FAQ/Help section.

The last resort is to collectively downvote such questions with the link to the explanations: http://idownvotedbecau.se/imageofcode

Answer 2

Of the questions OP linked, I find only the later two out of the four to be problematic in that aspect, and my answer will focus on those two. When the question is made clear enough but textual explanation is missing, I try to extend the question to include a clear textual explanation.

I often consider questions with insufficient text, especially when the question's subject is the text itself, as low quality questions. I often just ignore those, effectively panelizing bad question-asking behavior by not providing answers and I would encourage the community to do the same.

Aside from that, there's always downvoting and leaving a comment or even closing those questions as they are evidently do not provide a lot of value.

Such questions as 2 and 3, should also be candidates for flag as low quality, if OP does not include a textual version after instructed. Honestly, they are unsalvageable by anyone but the OP.