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Avery Payne
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Just chipping in my .02 cents from the peanut gallery...

First, there is an entire class of questions that are being pounded/closed out of existence instead of close-to-move. More often than not, when browsing the question queue, I see at least one question that should be Vote to move to site... instead of Vote to close because..., and my not-educated not-informed opinion of this is that we are encountering a class of people that do not know what systems administration happens to be, and they show up asking questions that should be asked elsewhere. In my not humble opinion we should always ask first, should this question be relocated elsewhere? Because I've seen good questions go to waste because it was quicker/easier for people to carpetbomb them into vapor, than it was to move them to their intended audience. ![enter image description here][1]


Second, there is another class of questions that could be classified as "I'm a noob here, I'm asking the obvious question because I've never done this before". These, too, are carpetbombed. We should always ask second, is this a noob that just needs some gentle guidance? ![enter image description here][2]


Last, there are the questions that really are garbage. Think about "Halp I have problem with cheeseburger, please fix" (Vote to close because we don't do cheeseburgers in the server room) and "The internet is down!" (Vote to close because user was obviously able to use the internet to post the question). When the question is just that bad, I think we can help with this process by leaving a detailed note from either a vote-to-close or a mod that says "The question doesn't belong because" instead of just voting to close. This sounds redundant, and it is, but I have my reason: the vote system does not convey nuance, it only conveys a general response. It's the difference between getting a form letter from your doctor saying "it was great to see you, watch that spot on your cheek", and getting a personal letter saying "we need you to come in right away to talk about cancer treatment options". If we don't use precision, and instead stick to the carpet bomb approach, we will never really carve out the targetted cancer...it will simple turn into metastasis. If the user is truly clueless, well, at least we left behind a message for other users that are not. And that means not having to answer the question again. It also gives us great cannon fodder to use for comments like "Vote to close because duplicate of..." which in turn points to the original clueless question, which will in turn have our old answer, reducing the amount of work involved.

![What a LART looks like to a luser on SF][3]


So, there you go. My two cents, although it was more like .07 with the tax thrown in. Sorry for the long read. [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/c5uA8.jpg [2]: https://i.sstatic.net/UKwDW.jpg [3]: https://i.sstatic.net/ZOTL8.png

Avery Payne
  • 14.7k
  • 16
  • 7