Timeline for We should bring back the "question must show a minimal understanding" close reason
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
27 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 23, 2017 at 15:33 | comment | added | ivan_pozdeev | "what problem are you trying to solve here?" - Easy. The proponents assert that such questions are not welcome here and thus shall not be answered and shall be deleted. And are asking for a <s>banhammer</s> tool to facilitate that goal. Downvotes don't quite do the trick: they do not prevent answers or incite deletion, do not provide a streamlined way to inform the asker (for a problem of such magnitude, a streamlined solution is needed) and for a newcomer with 1 rep, neither do they matter points-wise -- have no effect for the purpose of the goal, in brief. | |
| Mar 20, 2017 at 9:16 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/
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| Feb 19, 2016 at 5:31 | comment | added | user9517 | The original intent seems to perfectly fit our requirement. youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk | |
| Feb 19, 2016 at 0:21 | comment | added | Michael Hampton Mod | One thing that doesn't seem to have been mentioned is that we had this close reason in the past, and got rid of it, because it didn't really explain much of anything. Its replacement may not be much better, but it does give people a direction to go in. Whether they are capable of doing so is another matter, but if they aren't capable, that's not really our problem... | |
| Feb 18, 2016 at 23:55 | comment | added | Andrew B | I'll rephrase then, since it relates as much to the last comment as the one before it. Please don't ping my name if the dialogue we're going to have is tangential to my query at best. :/ I have no significant interest in this close reason and I'm the wrong person to talk to about it. If all you're trying to say is that we should be downvoting more, that's cool and I'm happy to leave it at that. If the statement is more than that, specifics are nice. | |
| Feb 18, 2016 at 23:17 | comment | added | Shog9 | I didn't ask you to defend anything, @Andrew. I asked - several times now - what the purpose of this feature request was. Y'all can already close anything you want; the request is for the addition of a specific close reason. So far, no one has mentioned hordes of students converging on the site, so I'm gonna conclude that none of you know what that close reason means nor have any interest in using it appropriately... Which is the same thing that happened on SO and why I regret ever writing it. But, my question still stands - if there's a real problem here somewhere, anywhere, I'm all ears. | |
| Feb 18, 2016 at 23:12 | comment | added | Andrew B | I was specifically addressing the idea that closing was not accomplishing something useful. The comment doesn't really address it, and I'm not going to defend a straw man redirect. | |
| Feb 18, 2016 at 23:07 | comment | added | Shog9 | Yeah, I know how closing works @Andrew. The request here isn't for the ability to close things... It's for a reason to close questions that don't demonstrate a minimal understanding. Now, I wrote that close reason originally - it was aimed at homework questions where the asker clearly hadn't read any of the assigned reading, and writing an answer sufficient to bring him up to speed would involve posting essentially a textbook. Because that's actually a problem on SO periodically. But that's not your problem. Your problem is apparently that people write... answers that others find useful? | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 23:50 | comment | added | Andrew B | On a separate note, my takeaway from Michael's comment RE: -4 should be that I was mistaken to avoid piling on additional downvotes. This was done to avoid punitizing people with good intentions; it was good enough for me if the question was on track for deletion. If it keeps stuff off the front page though, I guess that's worth a few more drama explosions by clueless people. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 23:42 | comment | added | Andrew B | Closing a question prevents answers from people who don't know better. Preventing answers prevents those answers from getting upvoted. No upvoted answers keeps the question in the autodelete pile. Keeping them in the autodelete pile means that they don't have to be flagged for deletion, an option which only becomes available after the question is closed and meets the other criteria. What am I missing? The fact that deletion is perceived as a waste of time, or something else? | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 12:42 | comment | added | Massimo | @MadHatter That is indeed an excellent suggestion. Do we already have a feature request for it? If not, you should post one. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 8:18 | comment | added | MadHatter | In addition to snark, it does occur to me that one way to significantly improve the use of downvoting to handle bad questions would be to add up/down voting buttons in the "close" queue review tool. If I didn't have to open a new tab for each question that I'm reviewing - which takes nearly 10 seconds to load to the point that I can vote - I'd do it much more often. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 8:07 | comment | added | MadHatter | Oh look, management drives by yet again, and yet again tells us that we can't try to manage the river of floaty brown questions the way we'd like to. @Shog9, you and I have personally talked about these issues before (if you remember); I was not then convinced that the paternalistic "we've seen this tried and it doesn't work" was valid, and I'm not convinced now. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 6:05 | comment | added | user9517 | > So again: what problem are you trying to solve here? Quality control - simples. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 2:05 | comment | added | Shog9 | Btw: deletion stats | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 2:01 | comment | added | Shog9 | Why? What problem are you hoping to solve with this, @Massimo? | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 1:17 | comment | added | Massimo | But my point still stands: since we have close reasons and we do close questions, it would be better to revise those reasons to properly address why we are VTC. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 1:15 | comment | added | Massimo | Ok, my bad, I didn't know downvotes on questions have no rep penalty and questions with -1 score are automatically deleted (but only if they have no answer). | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 1:11 | comment | added | Shog9 | Also not true, @Massimo. I should post some deletion stats here... | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 1:11 | comment | added | Michael Hampton Mod | @Massimo Actually, yes they do. Downvoting has more advantages: For instance, at -4, the post is removed from the homepage, and thus gets lower ranking in search engines. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 1:10 | comment | added | Massimo | @MichaelHampton Closed questions get deleted after a while, open questions with low votes don't. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 1:09 | comment | added | Shog9 | You might be interested to know that downvotes on questions are free to the voter, @Massimo. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 1:08 | comment | added | Massimo | About downvoting: the single strongest reason it's so rarely used is because of the reputation penalty involved in using it. People would use it rather more liberally if each downvote didn't mean a -1 for them, too. And yes, of course, -1 rep is very little... but it's definitely enough to abstain from mass-downvoting bad questions and only use it when a question is outrageously bad; I really don't think getting -1000 rep is a worthy reward for helping the community by pointing out 1000 bad questions. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 1:05 | comment | added | Shog9 | Yeah... Using a close reason to tell someone that they're clueless is a waste of time, a rube-goldbergian arrangement for doing something you could just say in a comment and should just say with a downvote. It's ineffective, chews up close votes and reviewer time that could be used for more pressing problems, and ends up just demoralizing the voters when eventually they realize that their votes aren't accomplishing anything. I'll forever regret adding that close reason on Stack Overflow, and never get back the time and goodwill I squandered trying to make it work... So why ask for it? | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 1:03 | comment | added | Michael Hampton Mod | @Massimo Why should such questions be closed, then? Easier all round to just downvote them into oblivion. | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 1:01 | comment | added | Massimo | This discussion is about close reasons. I know well enough that the actual close reason is not relevant at all, it's just abunch of text describing why you would like a question to be closed. But since we are limited in the possible close reasons we can use (unless we take time to write custom ones for each VTC), it makes sense to have one addressing the (sadly) most common reason we're VTC, i.e. "you don't have a clue about what you're doing". | |
| Feb 17, 2016 at 0:52 | history | answered | Shog9 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |