Timeline for answer to Overhauling our community's closure reasons and guidance by Lundin
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| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 11, 2022 at 14:22 | comment | added | Lundin | @DonaldDuck Often no duplicate exists simply because the question is so utterly basic, with zero research effort. "How does a for loop work in language x" and similar questions. You aren't meant to find the answer to such by googling, but by studying the most basic beginner material on the topic there is. As said in the answer: the purpose of SO is not to be an interactive beginner tutorial. | |
| Dec 10, 2022 at 15:21 | comment | added | Donald Duck is with Ukraine | I agree with the two first points, but disagree with the last one. Questions that don't demonstrate any knowledge or research about the problem usually fall into two categories: (1) homework dumps and (2) questions of the type "I want to do <some common problem> but I have no idea where to start". Questions in (1) are already covered by your second point. Questions in (2) are often duplicates and can be closed as such, and when they aren't, they're often the first result when googling for how to do that, and are very useful and shouldn't be closed at all. | |
| Oct 19, 2022 at 7:56 | comment | added | TheMaster | @CodyGray You said "work orders were never on-topic". What would be the appropriate close reason in that case? Let's say I need something done. I don't know how to code. I don't even want to frankenstein some code. What's stopping me from asking multiple parts of the "work order" as multiple questions(divided just enough to not qualify as "needs more focus"), getting specific answers from karma whores and even asking a final question - "How to combine all this"? and changing some variable names and selling the finished product? | |
| May 12, 2022 at 7:53 | comment | added | Lundin | @OrangeDog That's a good point, especially since such down-voted and deleted posts will count towards the poster's automatic question ban. In theory someone could get a question ban without ever knowing why - just that "people down-voted your questions". | |
| May 12, 2022 at 7:34 | comment | added | OrangeDog | The global downvote reason is "This question does not show research effort", and if a question attracts downvotes and no answers it is automatically closed and deleted. That there isn't an actual close reason for it makes no sense. | |
| May 12, 2022 at 6:42 | comment | added | Lundin | @TylerH The unclear reason could be made less unclear :) It doesn't hurt to be even more explicit regarding some of the most common close reasons. | |
| May 11, 2022 at 21:54 | comment | added | TylerH | Your first two are covered by the Unclear reason. Your last one is not a valid reason to close a question. | |
| May 7, 2022 at 1:48 | comment | added | Brian Ortiz | People can have their opinions of course, but trying to paint their gatekeeping away of beginner questions as somehow returning to "Jeff and Joel's original vision" is objectively false. Joel and Jeff have never said that beginner questions were not welcome or that they were necessarily low-quality. | |
| Apr 28, 2022 at 6:16 | comment | added | Lundin | @Shog9 I always believed that the best way to improve quality is if as many of the bad questions get caught before they even hit the site. Something for the "ask a question" revamp & wizard projects. And at some extent for automated scripts. But I don't think all those features can ever be made perfect, so we'll always have the need for manual moderation. | |
| Apr 27, 2022 at 20:56 | comment | added | Shog9 | The knowledge/research thing... I feel like the expectation here is that this'll be used to create some sort of minimal hurdle akin to the $1 that metafilter (used to?) charge for membership. The problem is... Close reasons don't act as a hurdle. Not for askers. Asking folks for research on the ask form would go a heck of a lot further in that regard. | |
| Apr 27, 2022 at 13:50 | comment | added | Lundin | There's already geeksforgeeks.org which has the ambition to provide high quality beginners tutorials but in practice provides low quality ones. Although not nearly as bad as SO's "interactive beginner tutorials" (fragmented Q&A about utterly basic stuff). Learning a whole programming language by asking inane questions on SO about every single thing in the language doesn't seem like a very productive way of learning. Which of course won't prevent those questions from getting asked and answered anyway! SO making the Internet a slightly worse place, one question at a time. | |
| Apr 27, 2022 at 13:39 | comment | added | Charlieface |
@CodyGray So in the company's opinion, there should be questions such as "How to make a conditional statement in {insert language}?" with the answer being "Use an if statement"... Is that really the point we want to descend to? That doesn't as much increase the sum total of good knowledge so much as completely bury actually useful knowledge (to any programmer who bothered to read a basic tutorial) under an obscene weight of useless questions (created by those who did not). Ultimately, Stack Overflow is simply not set up to create entire tutorials for languages.
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| Apr 26, 2022 at 19:22 | comment | added | Braiam | @CodyGray I don't see how what you say is different than what I said. I'm just expounding on the history of the scope of the site and how the current wording of the scope came to be, and that specific/unique and variations of thereof where always there. The scope hasn't changed, we just discovered their limits (and spawned several sites as result). | |
| Apr 26, 2022 at 14:32 | comment | added | Lundin | Also... we were already quite frustrated with those trash questions back in 2014 and the quality of the site has eroded much further since then. Nobody has solved the problem in 8 years. Also note how in 2014 I could have a long dialogue in comments with an employed CM who took the time to at least respond even though I was obviously quite pissed off at the changes. I don't see that happening in 2022. | |
| Apr 26, 2022 at 14:28 | comment | added | l4mpi | @CodyGray to TL;DR this whole discussion, many people have been fed up with garbage questions for years. The company line since the CR revamp linked by Lundin was always that "no effort" isn't directly corellated with "garbage question" because some zero-effort questions actually have value, thus there shouldn't be a "no effort" close reason as that might deprive us of a few decent questions. Ok, whatever, but we need an actual solution to the mountain of trash being dumped on SO daily, because that just makes the site worse for everyone - and nothing SO did so far worked. | |
| Apr 26, 2022 at 14:20 | comment | added | l4mpi | @CodyGray "We're still increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge" - a) we still get some decent Q/A pairs but we also bury existing knowledge under a trash heap and discoverability of information is a real issue (thus it's hard to say if the "knowledge value" of SO is going up or down), and b) we're also frustrating a lot of experts who don't want to wade through trash and either quit the site or heavily restricted their interactions with it. Just because there are still some good answers being added on SO doesn't mean the site is healthy or that the status quo can't be improved. | |
| Apr 26, 2022 at 14:18 | comment | added | Lundin | Shog9 listed the rationale about the changes as "There were a handful of people who interpreted "minimal understanding" as a euphemism for "visible effort" or even "a wall of code"." As in requiring posting of unreasonable amounts of code and not really as something to do with minimum of knowledge required. | |
| Apr 26, 2022 at 14:17 | comment | added | Lundin | @CodyGray The close reasons were silently changed by the company in 2014 here: Recent changes to close reasons on Stack Overflow. After which I protested both about the changed close reasons and the way they were silently changed without prior discussion with the community. To deaf ears. | |
| Apr 26, 2022 at 11:44 | comment | added | Cody Gray Mod | The "and/ors" @Braiam mentioned were added by Robert Harvey in May 2014. Clarification, not a scope change. So, again, this wasn't some conspiracy by the company to raise shareholder value, anything to do with the Summer of Love (which had nothing to do with topicality and everything to do with snarky comments), or any of the other ridiculous conspiracies trotted out in the comments here. Look, I get everyone's frustrated with actions the company's taken the past several years. I am, too. Probably more so, as a mod with greater exposure. But throwing this under that umbrella is just false. | |
| Apr 26, 2022 at 11:40 | comment | added | Cody Gray Mod | Atwood and Spolsky's original vision, @l4mpi. At no point were beginner questions ever off-topic here. Nor, despite the straw men continually built in the comments, were duplicates, work orders, or non-questions ever on-topic. We're still "increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world" when we answer beginner-level questions. The amount of knowledge possessed by the asker is quite irrelevant, as long as they ask a question that can be answered in a Q&A format. We're still optimizing for pearls, not sand. Never have I claimed otherwise. | |
| Apr 25, 2022 at 17:25 | comment | added | Braiam | @Lundin a technicality, the scope hasn't changed since the scope in /help/on-topic is a thing, circa 2013. The only thing that changed was adding and/ors. Some language came from here, but it was in the FAQ already. Note, that there are earlier examples, but somehow many missed that it was "programming questions... of interest to other programmers", and programming on a boat happened. | |
| Apr 25, 2022 at 11:28 | comment | added | l4mpi | @CodyGray "that conflict with the fundamental vision and purpose of the site" - which vision is that, exactly? The one of Jeff Atwood, which focused on a high quality Q/A repository (e.g. "optimize for pearls not sand") and was abandoned a long time ago? The visions (rather, hallucinations) of "Team DAG" or more recent misguided approaches which went so well that the key people are not being employed by SO anymore? Or the vision of the CEO of the company which bought SO for billions and has a ficundiary duty to shareholders to extract that much value from the site? | |
| Apr 24, 2022 at 16:41 | comment | added | Martin James | SO has 'welcomized' the close reasons so that they no longer clearly represent questions that should surely be closed. I have no intention of spending anything more than the absolute minimum of effort on questions where the poster has made a similar, minimum effort. I will certainly not go looking for dupes or find links to 'Computer 101 week 1' sites. Too many users are taking the piss, and I don't care about their 'feelings', whether real or, much more likely, just claimed. | |
| Apr 24, 2022 at 16:17 | comment | added | Lundin | @CodyGray Since the scope has changed over the years, we can change it back. [Introducing Stackoverflow.com]: "It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world." Answering some hundreds of "hello world" questions per day is not good or useful knowledge, it's spoon feeding of lazy kids who can't even bother to read chapter 1 in a beginner-level book. | |
| Apr 24, 2022 at 16:12 | comment | added | Lundin | @RichN No? Because I lost count of the "ask on SO instead of reading chapter 1 in a book" questions many years ago. It is not too much to ask of a would-be programmer to read chapter 1 in a beginner-level book. A large part of the programmer trade is about reading technical documentation. | |
| Apr 24, 2022 at 13:51 | comment | added | Martin James | I mean, 'I have basically no knowledge of for loops' stackoverflow.com/q/71984742/758133. :(( | |
| Apr 24, 2022 at 13:37 | comment | added | Martin James | 'No-one is trying to learn to program by just asking questions on SO'.......do you wish examples of exactly that? They are trivial to find:( | |
| Apr 24, 2022 at 13:12 | comment | added | Cody Gray Mod | There is no "traffic" motivation for making the site useful to everyone; that's just utter fiction and revisionist history. Nor is there any truth to this oft-repeated saw that professional or enthusiast programmers wouldn't ask or be interested in basic questions. Everyone is a beginner at something. If I try to learn Ruby today, I would be a complete beginner, and having high-quality Q&A here about very basic stuff would be exceptionally useful to me, just as is having high-quality Q&A here about the complex stuff that I seek out on a regular basis for languages that I know better. | |
| Apr 24, 2022 at 13:11 | comment | added | Cody Gray Mod | It is (obviously) not in scope to add (or even consider adding) close reasons that conflict with the fundamental vision and purpose of the site. So, yes, contributions to a discussion can and will be pointed out as invalid, because they are based on wrong/flawed premises, and thus discounted entirely. Yes, I remember well the "lacks minimal understanding" close reason. It was never a "this question is too basic" close reason, and people abusing it for things like this and lack of "effort" is why the option was removed. There was strong community consensus. And it wasn't there at launch. | |
| Apr 24, 2022 at 8:56 | comment | added | Rich N | No-one is trying to learn to program by just asking questions on SO. However people learning to program do get stuck on strange things that to you and me are blindingly obvious. Why shouldn't they be able to ask questions about those things here? Equally EVERY question shows a lack of expertise at some level, every question could be answered by spending enough time with books and documentation. Setting some arbitrary bar of expertise below which we won't answer doesn't really make any sense to me. | |
| Apr 23, 2022 at 16:51 | comment | added | Braiam | @CodyGray this site audience is "professional or enthusiast programmers", I don't think those kind of questions is what such audience would want. | |
| Apr 23, 2022 at 13:49 | comment | added | Lundin | @PeterMortensen Yes and since digging up duplicates is more effort than answering the question, the same boring chapter 1 beginner questions get asked and answered over and over again. One problem is that SO's duplicate system is so bad, but we've asked for a better one for as long as anyone can remember and evidently it ain't gonna happen. This is a quick solution in the meantime. I agree that the rep farmers who keep answering over and over even though a well-known duplicate exists are a big problem - it could perhaps partially be solved by weighing down-votes as heavy as up-votes. | |
| Apr 23, 2022 at 13:32 | comment | added | Peter Mortensen | Neither demonstrated effort nor non-beginner is required. The real problem is that such mega duplicate (or unanswerable) questions are not immediately closed as duplicates. The opposite happens: They are answered instead and there isn't any effort to find the duplicate. There ought to be some real risk of knowingly answering blatantly duplicate questions. | |
| Apr 23, 2022 at 12:34 | comment | added | Lundin | @CodyGray Opinions cannot be right or wrong, that's not how discussions work. One purpose of meta is to decide what site the community wishes to have. I can't blame you for not remembering the "must demonstrate a minimum knowledge" close reason since it was removed by the company some 8 years back, though not through community consensus. It was there though, pretty much since the site was launched. Back in the days the ambition was to create a site useful for programmers and not for students with homework problems in order to gain maximum traffic. | |
| Apr 23, 2022 at 10:57 | comment | added | Cody Gray Mod | "The purpose of the site is not to give answers which can easily be found in the first chapter of a beginner-level book. Or through a brief search with an Internet search engine ("let me Google that for you")." This is wrong. See the tour, wherein it is noted that our goal is to build a library of high-quality answers to every question about programming. There is no requirement that a question not be too basic. That is not, and has never been, a close reason. "You are conflating three different forms of 'effort'". | |
| Apr 23, 2022 at 10:52 | history | edited | QHarr | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 22, 2022 at 13:28 | comment | added | Braiam | The third point is probably looking for the analogous to ServerFaul's "Questions should demonstrate reasonable information technology management practices. Questions that relate to unsupported hardware or software platforms or unmaintained environments may not be suitable for Server Fault." | |
| Apr 21, 2022 at 15:02 | comment | added | jay.sf | Big upvote from me for demonstrate minimum of knowledge/research! | |
| Apr 21, 2022 at 13:44 | history | answered | Lundin | CC BY-SA 4.0 |