I think when a user asks a "short question", there is no problem if they get a "long reply".
One idea I had was to write some PHP code that would add a block with a "Fun UNIX Fact" or "Fun Linux Fact" and append it to any post which:
- A short question without a reply, and;
- The original question is very short.
Yesterday, when checking the links in Google Search Console, tried this technique on a few unanswered initial posts, and I added a block of text to those 'soft 404 errors' and then the thread passed.
Or instead of "Fun UNIX Fact", I would write some code to take the "Similar Thread" data for that unanswered thread, and create a forum reply with the post data from a similar thread somehow, or append a block of the summary data to the original question, and kind of embedded "Topics Related to This" block, appended to short questions with no replies after a period of time (like a week).
I need to check to see if the current "soft 404 error" pages have similar threads at the bottom.
If they do, then another possibility would be to rewrite the similar thread block to include summary data for those similar thread, say the first 10 link lines for each "similar thread" in that block. That might work