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If you, my peers, have decided that a question should be closed, why oh why does it still show up in the list of questions on the main Serverfault page? Even if this continues to be the default behavior, it would be nice to have an option -- like we do for "ignored tags" -- to completely hide these questions, since most often they've been closed for good reason.

EDIT: Based on the comments so far, I'd like to emphasize: I'm suggesting an optional behavior, not a change in the default behavior. I understand that some people may want to see closed questions. These days, most of the closed questions I see are closed because they're pretty low quality, and I would be happy to ignore them, but there are certainly exceptions.

Simply tagging closed questions as "closed" would let me do what I want using the existing "ignored tags" filter.

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  • +1 Option to hide closed questions would be nice - very low priority..
    – Chris S
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:27

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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I believe it would be nice for users to have the option of hiding closed questions and perhaps an automatically added "closed" tag would be the simplest solution.

Another option I would like to see even more is the ability to hide deleted answers (they are visibly for those over 10K). I really can't see any need to have them visible and they merely detract from the usability of the site. Again, perhaps a user configurable setting would be appropriate.

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    I think making it a user setting is the way to go. In a way its almost just another tag or view as much as anything else (I realise it might not be implementable in that way, I'm just thinking from a user perspective here).
    – Rob Moir
    Feb 1, 2011 at 23:23
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Take, for example, a question that was migrated to a different site. It's still a valid question, just not on the site it was asked. Someone else might have an interest in the question at which point they'll get redirected to the site to which the question was migrated.

In addition, keeping closed questions visible helps the community see what type of content gets closed and for what reasons.

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    While that sounds reasonable, I don't believe keeping the closed/moved questions visible does anything to prevent others from posting the same or similar question. Remember, these are generally posted by people who couldn't be bothered reading the FAQ or the list of possible duplicates, despite all the prompting, so don't expect them to notice already closed questions. If a question gets moved to a more appropriate site, leaving it listed on the wrong site merely attracts more because it will show up in search engines as being on the original site, so that's where people will go.
    – John Gardeniers
    Feb 1, 2011 at 22:23
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If closed questions where hidden then how would you find them to vote so you could re-open?

I suppose a per-user filter could be created, I don't haven any problem with that. I really wonder if this is a common enough need on serverfault to make the effort to build such a filter worthwhile. We don't have that many close questions that it has ever really bugged me.

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    Simply tagging them "closed" would allow the existing "ignored tags" filter to do all the work, so there's not that much in the way of implementation work. The vast majority of closed questions I don't want to see. As I said, I'm suggesting this as a per-user option, not a change in the default behavior.
    – larsks
    Feb 1, 2011 at 19:13

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