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This is very half-baked and just brainstorming at the moment, but it'd be good if askers received some sort of feedback that people were working on responding to them. Right now, some questions sit at zero answers for some time, and it can be hard to know if it's because the question is really hard, or because somebody is mullin over and maybe doing some research in their spare time but haven't put together a real "answer" yet, or if it's that there are so few answerers in a community that they're not likely to ever see a response. Upvotes mitigate this somewhat, but I know I upvote questions where "This is interesting and well-written and I'd like to see a response too" but I don't plan on answering myself.

Some of this may not be technological features that are needed, but expectations around what's needed to start posting an answer, if pointers to a few resources (some kind of "partial answer") is acceptable to people, or if just there should be an expectation of certain comments of "This is really interesting and I'm trying to dig into this in my spare time to try to help but don't know if I'll get to writing up an answer anytime soon" is something that should be encouraged? And maybe some community efforts to try to *find* questions that are sitting around unanswered for too long (which the cross-community "ads" may be the start of but there might be more we can do)?