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As already discussed here, I think there is a serious problem with people asking questions which are utterly and totally unanswerable because they don't have a clue about what they are doing.

Those questions are unsalvageable, the most we can do is downvote and/or close them; but there are no readily available close reasons to use, and we need to resort to "questions should demonstrate reasonable information technology management practices" or "questions on Server Fault must be about managing information technology systems in a business environment" (which, as I already said, could be merged).

If we can have at most five reasons to close questions, I think "you don't know what you are talking about and you should really get a clue" (of course in a softer hue) would be a lot more useful than some of the current ones.

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  • While unfortunate that SF needs to give away one of the 5 slots for more or less just a better "needs clarity" - I always liked that the close reasons here are "do this" and not merely "you did the wrong thing". Can you think of a good .. lets call it demand to the asker? The best I could come up with is "google that and then try again", but its not generic enough.
    – anx
    Commented Dec 26, 2020 at 10:40

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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5 custom close reasons is the max allowed. Although some of the current reasons overlap a bit, they all come up often enough that I wouldn't choose to get rid of them.

I think the "Questions seeking installation, configuration or diagnostic help" close reason is the closest fit for truly clueless questions.

In addition to Ia^H^Huser9517's suggestion, there are a couple other possibilities:

  • Cast some delete votes. Anyone else who's able to vote to delete can see a list of questions with delete votes on the Review/Tools page: https://serverfault.com/tools
  • If the question is truly unsalvageable, you could flag it as Very Low Quality
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  • Compassionate downvotes help speed up putting questions out of their misery too
    – user9517
    Commented Dec 22, 2020 at 13:16
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Sadly, I don't think this is going to fly as it will hurt people's feelings which goes against company policy.

Your best bet it to roll your own by choosing Close -> A community-specific reason -> Other - add a comment

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