"Unclear what you're asking" - Is it?

Question

Today, I have seen (and answered) this question on zfs. For me, the question made perfect sense and has been well-researched and well-written. Yet, it managed to earn two close votes where the close reason given has been "unclear what you're asking". No voter bothered to leave a comment.

As I only can see some sense in the the "unclear what you're asking" close reason if specific information is being asked for, I am requesting to consider the following options:

1. request a mandatory comment with this close reason, where the voter would need to specify what information is missing
2. present a big, red "only check this close reason if you are actually familiar with the topic of the question and please leave a comment explaining what is missing" warning box to everyone who is checking the "unclear what you're asking" close reason. Only let the voter proceed if he has clicked the "Yes", "I promise" and "I really mean it" buttons in sequence¹.
3. remove this close reason altogether

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¹ _{I assumed this line would be recognized as obvious irony and taken with a grain of salt. Of course I do not really want to suggest a button sequence but simply something to make a voter aware that she/he should make a conscious decision here.}

Answer 1

Currently, three Leave Open votes take a question out of the close queue and begin the aging of the existing close votes, if it had not already begun by the question receiving 100 views. When aging begins, close votes expire four days later.

This question received its three Leave Open votes and will remain open unless two other people go far out of their way to hunt down the question and throw close votes on it in the next few days.

I think that in general this system works, and seems to have worked in this particular case.

Answer 2

I voted to leave the question open when I saw it in the queue, because I thought it was reasonable for various reasons that boil down to what you said at the beginning. It is, of course, subject area which I'm not familiar with really at all.

That said, I don't think the process is broken on the whole. Certainly it's possible for five people voting the same way to be wrong, but it seems to happen pretty rarely. What is actually needed is some real impact for leave open votes - they could do things like:

• Require an additional close vote for every time someone clicks "leave open"
• Automatically place a reopen vote from the user who clicked "leave open" on the question, if it is later closed

Forcing people to comment doesn't work, and certainly we need a close reason in that theme. It's the successor to the older "not a real question", and is intended for cases where the question is completely incomprehensible, or where we actually can't tell where the question is. For instance, if someone were to post a log and nothing else, or make a bunch of statements thinking we will guess what the problem is, the question should be closed and it should be closed with that reason.

I'm not sure why your question garners so much hate - I see it's got three close votes now, but you may notice it's not closed. This is why we require five votes. Looks like things are working as intended.

Poorly formatted questions also tend to attract down and close votes, rightly or wrongly. For instance, if I abuse the markdown code highlighting function and I highlight almost every word with backticks just because it's jargon or important, it makes the question less readable (and I suppose less clear). You should only use it for things like actual keywords (and then sparingly), and commands and other places where it improves legibility. Also use the > mark for block quotes, like this:

For me, the question made perfect sense and has been well-researched and well-written.

That is more natural than

For me, the question made perfect sense and has been well-researched and well-written.

Or

For me, the question made perfect sense and has been well-researched and well-written.

The reason I think is readily apparent. I've gone ahead and boldly reformatted your stuff in the hopes that people get their hackles up about it less, as one of those close votes might well have been due to highlighting "man page" as code. People can be petty!

Answer 3

One of the reviewers who voted to close has often seemed (to me) to be something of a robo-reviewer, so I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for an explanation from them. It has a couple of "leave open" votes, but I've been clear on what those do.

Since a mod is looking at this meta question, maybe it could just be hammered open?

request a mandatory comment with this close reason,

Mandatory comments won't work... if someone decided a question was unclear but didn't want to justify it, they could just type in "blah blah blah" and/or delete the comment later.

remove this close reason altogether

NO! There are tons of barely-comprehensible questions that "unclear" is perfect for.

Having multiple buttons to click through also seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater... and considering how much discussion it's taken to get an additional couple clicks for new askers, I doubt this would happen.