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I have been more active in the close queue lately and found myself looking for specific close reasons, or even anything close to them, but not seeing them. I don't know the proper process for requesting close reasons so I'm going off an old meta question, and yes I read the reason it was locked, I'm just assuming it was locked b/c it served it's purpose and to prevent new activity on the question.

I know we get custom close reasons, which is fine, but the big blue box is what the OP is likely to look at, and also better, more fine tuned close reasons would speed up the review process.

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Reset to default
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One reason I propose is either

Failure to show prior effort to solve the problem

According to our guidelines for asking a good question, Server Fault should be the last stop in your quest for an answer, after you've exhausted other avenues of research.

A more well encompassed reason would be something like

This question does not meet the minimum requirements set by the community.

This question either shows a lack of prior research, lack of information, or otherwise does not meet the guidelines of how to ask a good question

This is only one suggestion, just two options for verbage.

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    The first is reasonably close to Unclear, which links to serverfault.com/help/how-to-ask which is moderators editable; why not just propose some more specific research guidance for that? See the example on SO: stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask
    – Shog9
    Commented Apr 11, 2015 at 15:41
  • @Shog9 In some examples the OP has clearly defined a question, but showed lack of research, this is the most common example I see, I can provide examples if needed. I will take a look at SO's how to ask page and provide more feedback.
    – MDMoore313
    Commented Apr 11, 2015 at 15:53
  • @Shog9 I like the way their page looks, I will probably post another meta question as a proposal to change our own page to be something similar but more sysadmin-ey.
    – MDMoore313
    Commented Apr 11, 2015 at 16:01
  • The big problem on SO wasn't so much lack of research, but lack of research that contributed to understanding the problem. If the question is trivially answerable without any additional research, then it should be a duplicate for a mature site - hence our efforts over the past year to make dup-closing faster and easier.
    – Shog9
    Commented Apr 11, 2015 at 16:42
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    (And yeah, some will be dups of "how to analyze a log file for x" - still beats having to pick a custom close reason. Oh, that reminds me... I need to figure out what's wrong with the dup-suggester.)
    – Shog9
    Commented Apr 11, 2015 at 16:45
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    I support the first answer above, maybe retitled "Failure to show effort to solve the problem on their own". This reason is tucked into the "installation, configuration, or diagnostic help" reason by the phrase "and attempted solutions", but I really think it deserves its own category. It's very common and is usually why I choose that closing reason.
    – Andrew Schulman
    Commented Apr 11, 2015 at 23:29
  • @AndrewSchulman good one, I updated the first verbage.
    – MDMoore313
    Commented Apr 12, 2015 at 0:23
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    I agree with the first one, because it leans very closely to a similar response I gave to the previous discussion. Looking at the kerfuffle in this weeks meta threads I don't think this question will see the attention it probably deserves though.
    – Reaces
    Commented Apr 12, 2015 at 12:23
  • Given the way the comments are going, do you want to break those reasons out into two questions? It will be easier to defend community approval of any new close reason if the vote is unambiguous.
    – MadHatter
    Commented Apr 18, 2015 at 8:42

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