@Peter It's band gape not band gap.  I think that's why you are confused. :-)  Plz help me.

Alan, 

what is the band gape of water?

@Yurii No idea. Perhaps it's 42.  Plz help me.

Alan, I think it's between 43 and 45 (this is a confidential information, can be used only after my authorization)

Yes, I can get 43 from 42 by multiplying by 43/42 and I can get 45 from 42 by multiplying by 45/42. Wow!  Your insight is amazing!  That's why I have recommended your reply.

Alan, Have you seen my recent question?

@ Yurii Do you mean the one that starts: 'Recently I posted my comments to one of the “question” in as mild as possible tone.  My comments were removed and I received the following e-mail: “Dear Yurii, Kindly note that this is the second time...'  I can't access this question.  Follow seems to work. Trying to access the question takes me back to the main menu...

Yes

If you frame a question in an awkward way without units and with plenty of spelling mistakes, you will get no useful response or get nonsensical comments like the above. 

Please re-post the question after reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photocatalytic_water_splitting

Dear Farooq, 

you are absolutely right. For the comments like yours I received a warning letter from RG administration. You are the next in the line. Try to get the access to my question "censorship" and you will understand all our comments. They are not the garbage, we understand well what we are talking about. I can't disclose details.

Dear Geletii, I gather that your question was removed. Cannot find it. I have a soft heart for students from underprivileged universities. They might not have had access to good teachers or books. By making fun of them in public, it rather discourages them from asking questions. The term "bandgap of water" does exist for example in Nature etc. http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v8/n8/full/nphoton.2014.181.html, and given that English is a foreign language (to them), one can be somewhat forgiving.

Dear Farooq, 

we did not joke about Abdur Rahim. We used the "Aesop language" to avoid  wording similar to that of in your comment. Thanks for the reference. The "bandgap of water"  exists under extreme conditions (doi:10.1038/ncomms4919). English is not my native language, I always use "check spelling." 

@M. Farooq Wahab   While I have a great deal of patience and sympathy for non-native speakers, there is a lot that such aspiring scientists can do to obtain a reasonable and reasoned response. 

First, they can get someone else (ideally a native speaker) to proof-read their question - after all it is the days of email!  That way most of the typos and grammatical errors can be spotted and corrected.  'Band gape' can easily be seen to be ridiculous just simply on the number of Google hits in comparison to 'band gap'.  Can anyone find a single textbook with 'band gape' present?  I'm using this example as this is the post we're talking about, but there are literally tens of similar examples each day on ResearchGate.

Second, and most important, they can conduct a little (Google or Wiki) research of their own before posting.  Just a few seconds brings up the attachment that may be a direct clue that the brain should be engaged before the finger is put to keyboard. 

Third, they may wish to ask their tutor, professor, or friend at college, school or university.  Experts on ResearchGate give of their time freely to help others that have a genuine research problem not those playing on the internet late at night. 

Fourth, they may wish to read their question again and pay attention to the replies immediately instead of waiting days and then either changing the question completely or bringing in new facts that were pertinent to the original question and thus would misdirect a responder without this prior knowledge. Or just ignoring the replies......

Now, in this case, the question has not been modified but the poster has not taken the time to respond (even with apparent confusion with some of the ambiguous replies and 'in jokes' - and, yes, I am guilty as charged with such replies) and either correct or withdraw the question. 

Unfortunately there's a lot of 'noise' on ResearchGate and this clogs the signal for those posters that have a fundamental, genuine or difficult issue to resolve that challenges experts like myself to try and fathom out.  Believe it or not, many of us enjoy such challenges and racking our single remaining neurons. 

Posters can help themselves and others by posting reasoned, thought out, sensible, and grammatically correct (spell check anyone?) questions.

@M. Farooq Wahab   And thank you for the reference.  Again a little 5 second search brings up the concept of band gap of water and I attach just one of the many articles that's accessible on the thing called the World Wide Web.  I gather than this entity (often abbreviated to www) is popular these days.  I am old enough to remember the use of libraries in this regard!  How we've moved forward...

https://web.science.uu.nl/SCM/Articles/2015/Fang_PhysChemChemPhys_2015.pdf

Dear Alan, I totally agree with most of your points. The younger generation has forgotten libraries. They take short-cuts. I also appreciate when someone answers my occasional questions and in turn I help others. However, as scientists we should worry about the signal to noise ratio rather than the absolute noise. The fundamental shot noise also increases as signal increases...but the ratio matters. So much so for my Aesop allegories. Although people complain about a lot of noise on RG, the observation is that the very same people generate 10-fold more noise in turn. If you remember the "fungus question". A spammer posted a cut-paste answer which had nothing to do with the question after that under the guise of complaining, the very same complainant generated plenty of posts which were worse than the original spam.

@ M. Farooq Wahab Yes, signal-to-noise is the vital concern.  But finding the signal is not like a correlator where we can continually subtract the noise and will be left with the signal. Yes, I was part of the fungus problem - and also part of the solution too: but I don't believe that I generate 10 times as much noise as signal (at least I hope not).  You're right in one major respect - if we don't react then the noise/spam won't grow.  That can be taken to the extreme and simply withdrawing from RG (as I've done on both Facebook and LinkedIn) is a simple cure to this irritation. However, how can we teach the new generation to take care before opening their mouths or keyboards and generating apparent nonsense?  BTW, I am not a native American speaker either.

Why should one withdraw from RG, just because some students posted questions? RG thrives on useful contributions like yours. I follow your answers since I also interested in colloid science-how particles pack under pressure.

I think the best approach is to ignore such questions or perhaps give a chance assuming the question was genuine. My fear is that very useful groups for example Google groups like sci.chem, and Chemed-l vanished because of spam. In good times, I made good friends, after 12 years, we are thinking of writing a paper together. In general, noisy questions will automatically be buried in the signal. English is not my first language either.

Dear Alan and Farooq,

I raised the question about the "noise":

Yurii V Geletii asked a question in Scholar:

How to deal with ill-posed questions?If the question omits some important information, we can ask  more information. Sometimes we can help to clearer formulate the question. At the same time the forum is flooded by elementary questions or by questions which do not make any sense. How we can encourage the young scholars to do a minimum their own homework. If someone has an access to RG, why he or she do not google first. Could active downvoting discourage to post such question?

Dear Abdur, 

I personally apologise if I insulted you by my comments. The discussion went far away from your original question. I hope you learned much how to be more professional in formulating questions. 

I would encourage you to be actively involved in Q&A forum. Please, edit your question, reply and divert the discussion into the right direction.