The War of the Closes

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/06/the-war-of-the-closes/

by UweSchmidt • 13 years ago

90 103 13 years ago

blog.stackoverflow.com

1. “On hold” will replace “closed” on newly closed posts

2. New close reasons are nicer and clearer

3. Questions edited by the original poster automatically go to the re-open queue

archon• 13 years ago

All dupes now must point to an answered question, and the new language focuses on getting you answers

This one is the most useful, I think. I've stumbled across closed-for-duplication answers before via google searches and found myself wondering what the question duplicated.

cruise0210• 13 years ago

Answers are never closed as duplicates. Only questions are closed as duplicates of other questions that ask the same thing. The change is that now the original question should have an answer.

sergiotapia3• 13 years ago

I'm still kind of pissed off that useful questions are closed on Stackoverflow because it doesn't 'fit the Q&A style of the site.'

http://i.imgur.com/VcqqSN9.jpg

You see questions with 400 upvotes closed by some user who has been on the site for 6 months and is autistic about earning internet points.

Afforess• 13 years ago

I wish those questions would be moved to the relevant StackExchange site. Often times it's just a case of misplaced question, where it might fit better in superuser or it. It should be moved in those cases.

loumf2• 13 years ago

This is a feature of the closing process on StackOverflow -- don't use the other SE sites as much.

You pick "off-topic" and is asks if it would be "on-topic" somewhere else and offers some suggestions.

rhizome6• 13 years ago

For that matter, a question could be connected to multiple SE sites.

cruise0210• 13 years ago

Stack Overflow has had problems in the past where unclear or otherwise low-quality questions get migrated to sites where they don't really belong. If a question is clear and you know for sure where it belongs, you can flag it for a moderator to migrate.

klapinat0r• 13 years ago

There have been numerous of such stackoverflow posts submitted here, so one might argue: there's a void.

Would be wonderful to see a complementary service to stackexchange's (with the HN community that might be a possible venture? ;)), but in most of the cases I can recall, Quora is just that. Quora has the same "noise" problems as stackoverflow, what with "which ipod is best? lol", but for genuinely interesting questions, meta or opinionbased, Quora is the place I most often see that.

insteadof• 13 years ago

If it doesn't fit what the site is structured for, why should it stick around? Aren't there plenty of other sites that can host it? Or is Stack Overflow the only place to host code snips?

Do you have any example 400+ upvoted questions you can point to that aren't of the type "everybody bring out all the snippets you've been saving, this time we're putting on a show"?

sergiotapia3• 13 years ago

It's not about hosting code snips or even nice Markdown css styling. It's about have your question reach the most amount of knowledgable people. Stackoverflow is the best place for that, regardless of their [stupid] closing policies.

rhizome6• 13 years ago

If it doesn't fit what the site is structured for

It's not complicated: questions and answers. This is common in sitebuilding though: "so unique we are." Well, at the end of the day it's just posts and comments, so quit milkin' it. A question that receives answers fits, I don't know how you could say otherwise.

However, this is all just a nice example of NIH Syndrome on SO's part, since these are lessons that have been learned by anybody who's hung out in a large IRC channel with kick/ban bots and arrogant ops, as well as being practiced on a web level for over 10 years by the likes of Metafilter.

It also reads to me like they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the community part without the humanity, since people's irrelevancies in questions fall into more than the 6 (or however many) preset reasons for closure. This may be an incontrovertible attribute of SO: their "model" (as criticized above) does not allow for the community, "topical identity" if you will, they are seeking to impose themselves,.

soundgecko• 13 years ago

I sincerely wish there were better ways of expressing ideas than memegenerated images that seems to be infecting almost every forum I read. Take a look at http://reddit.com/r/gaming All the posts are image macros or comics. One might think that only images were allowed there, but memes seem to be honey to garner upvotes and have killed all other content on that particular subreddit.

isleyaardvark• 13 years ago

That's going to happen on any popular subreddit that allows memes. This comment explains how it happens:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/o1zjo/ban_memes_...

tnorthcutt• 13 years ago

is autistic about earning internet points

You may not realize it, but language like this is not only grammatically incorrect (you can't be autistic about something), but could be pretty offensive to people who are either autistic or have a friend or family member who is.

Why use a neural development disorder as a derogatory term?

wtbob• 13 years ago

Why use a neural development disorder as a derogatory term?

Because it's derogatory to accuse someone of disordered neural development.

sergiotapia3• 13 years ago

Then those people can be offended, it's their right, no? I have a cousin who is retarded but I don't wince every time someone says or writes the word.

I didn't say autistic as an insult to those people but as a way to colorfully describe behaviour that is typical of people with autism.

dmschulman2• 13 years ago

So will StackOverflow reinstate my account which was banned after asking 1 question?

I love the fact that such a service exists but their moderation policies are (were?) not the least bit friendly

gortok2• 13 years ago

I'm a moderator on Stack Overflow ( http://stackoverflow.com/users/16587 ). If you can post on Meta ( http://meta.stackoverflow.com ), we can take a look and let you know why you're question banned. However, I can tell you from experience that no one is post banned after one question (also, you can't see your deleted questions on your profile, which may lead you to believe you've only had one post).

smackfu4• 13 years ago

I know you have good intentions, but consider that your response reads as: "I can help you. However, you are lying or incorrect."

jere• 13 years ago

Are you notified when your questions are closed?

I had a question about about alternatives to Amazon's Product Advertising API that was there for a long time. I felt like it was fairly useful to people. It had 20+ upvotes and a dozen favorites. Then one day it disappeared without warning and leaving no trace it ever existed.

loumf2• 13 years ago

I had a question closed on Cooking and was notified. There's a notification area to check (usually gives some signal in the upper-left to look).

smackfu4• 13 years ago

Off-topic closes were definitely unfriendly before. It would show all five or six users who had voted to close, which felt excessive and like being ganged up on, and just had a generic message "Questions on Stack Overflow are expected to relate to programming or software development within the scope defined in the FAQ." Where that FAQ link is to the whole FAQ, which had dozens of questions.

I hope the new approach helps, but strict arbitrary off-topic lines are still going to come across as hostile, IMHO. Especially when there is no StackExchange site that the question is on-topic for.

cruise0210• 13 years ago

You left out half the message.

Questions on Stack Overflow are expected to relate to programming or software development within the scope defined in the FAQ. Consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement if you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope. Read more about closed questions here.

The second part links to a section of the FAQ (now the Help Center) that explains why questions are closed.

http://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions

The off-topic bullet links to a detailed section on what kinds of questions you can and cannot ask.

http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic

smackfu4• 13 years ago

It's tough because I think those bullets in the last link are way too fuzzy to actually be useful guidelines to someone who isn't already very familiar with the all the sites.

SeanDav2• 13 years ago

The changes are a step in the right direction, however I see no mention of the situation where questions with many upvotes are closed. I find it incredibly arrogant that a mod can come close a topic that has many upvotes. It is basically saying to the community that all their opinions count for nothing, which is pretty disrespectful to a community that prides itself (rightly so) on its high number of domain experts.

The other truly irritating thing about SO/SE is their propensity for closing opinion based questions. I am sure that I am not the only one that finds domain experts arguing about for example, the merits of 1 library over another, or language A over Language B, rather useful (I often use their answers as a basis for further research to see if I agree or can find supporting evidence). Allow the community to vote up the opinion based answers they like and downvote the trolling/flaming answers.

rhizome6• 13 years ago

One of the changes they describe is about reformulating questions to better fit their "model." I didn't see any indication that people would be getting any indication or explanation of what their "model" is, but it's pretty much just another "closed...FU."

cruise0210• 13 years ago

The explanation of what the "model" is has always been there, linked in the close reason.

jaydles• 13 years ago

DISCLOSURE: I wrote that blog post, I work for SE, I AM biased.

Thanks for the general support.

You raise two concerns, though:

1. Upvotes - this is tricky. The problem with never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed is twofold:

- Sometimes, what's allowed changes over time. Communities start out allowing almost anything "What's a good snack to help programmers stay awake?", but eventually decide that they need to limit things to a narrower focus. If communities who do that can't close those questions, they'll attract more like them. - Some popular things are way off base to start with. You might be able to attract a ton of upvotes for an xkcd post, but you really wouldn't wan't the site full of them just because they're broadly loved.

2. opinion based questions - the changes are designed to help a little with what you're worried about: "primarily opinion based" now explicitly acknowledges that many good answers incorporate some expert opinion. But you still want some limit, no? "Which is better, Ruby or PHP?" isn't good for anybody, and the new reasons are designed to make it clearer that some opinion is ok, if it comes from expert experience or can be supported by facts, references, etc. Where that line belongs is for each community to decide.

SeanDav2• 13 years ago

OT: Love your style of writing - I am a fan.

Back On Topic:

1. With the examples you gave I can see there are going to be issues, however I have seen many, more focused examples with sometimes a very large number of upvotes, get closed. Typically a question along these lines will be closed - "What is the best book to learn C++ if I already know Java?" In this case there is no correct answer and the answers will be completely opinion based, but there are still many good answers (and books) that will be relevant.

2. I agree with you that such a broad based question should be closed but even more focused questions are also closed, very similar to the one I used above where there can be quite a few valid - and completely different opinions.

I realise that it is a balancing act and for sure you are moving in the right direction. I am hoping that opinion based questions/answers will be given more leeway going forward.

angersock6• 13 years ago

I'll flat-out disagree with you about the opinion-based questions.

We're in a young-enough industry and practice that opinions are really the coin of the realm--there is not the same standard accept methodology you'd see in, say, mechanical engineering.

To pretend that opinions aren't somehow a useful component of learning here is absurd--all the more so because beginners need opinions to start. Once they learn more, once they get exposed to other ideas, then they can form their own opinions. But to pretend that this happens in a vacuum is quite wrong.

Your example "Which is better, Ruby or PHP?" is exactly where opinions, properly backed-up, are useful: a good answer will say "Well, Ruby has these great metaprogramming features, but PHP has a much larger developer pool, and so on". Bad answers will of course just be "ruby is teh 1337 n00b". If only there was some kind of way that Stack Overflow let users filter good answers from bad answers...

At the end of the day, opinions and their debate are what are most useful to a beginner, especially when they don't know what questions to ask or issues to consider. The big failing right now is that you aren't trusting your community enough to filter out the garbage.

fragmede2• 13 years ago

never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed

Don't make it never, just raise the threshold?

Make it require X moderators to agree before it can be closed.

Make it so that opinion answers don't get rep.

Make it so the questions are put on hold and go to meta stack overflow.

(I don't acctually use stack overflow; apologies if you already do that.)

The closing of popular questions by a mod on a drunken power-hungry semantics trip is to the exclusion of the community is very off-putting for the regular members of the community who do the majority of the answering.

joelthelion5• 13 years ago

"Which is better, Ruby or PHP?"

Note that this would fit perfectly in the "too broad" reason for closing.

bluecalm• 13 years ago

I disagree about "not good for anybody". Reading opinions of experts even on topics like" PHP or Ruby" could be very educational. It's a way of sharing experience. If you face decisions about which technology to choose you want to soak that. Asking specific questions is not enough - the thing about experience is that people who have it encountered problems you often can't think of at the beginning of the way. What's the problem with adding "subjective" tag and allow filtering so people who don't want to see opinion based discussion won't ever encounter it while allowing others to enjoy it and learn from it ?

I agree with top comment (as of now) that SO stance on it is arrogant and display lack of respect for great community. I also don't like that SO staff attribute their success to stance on this issue. Yes SO is very successful and by far the best place to learn/seek help the reasons are plenty: great interface, very fast, great search, great reputation system, a bit of luck as well. It doesn't mean every decision you took contributed to your success. Do you really think that closing popular/upvoted questions based on some arbitrary policy thus stopping discussion for the sake of stopping it (it's not as it clutters the site or anything) makes anybody more happy about the site ?

I still often search for most popular SO questions in history, many of them closed and containing a lot of great information. It's sad to think that a lot more was lost due to overeager closing. Forunately it was better at the beginning so some of those discussions developed a bit before being shut down.

For example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most... Is great read for someone starting with VIM,it got people excited, many upvoted and many participated. Do you really think closing it contribute to quality of the site ? Another example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c So many posts like the most upvoted answer in first and OP in 2nd (after edits) weren't written because of your policy. It's just sad :(

columbo• 13 years ago

The problem with never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed is twofold:

You could always make the number of moderators required to close a topic increase as the topic rises in popularity.

A +4 question might need 2 moderators to close but a +2000 question might need 12 moderators to close.

ChikkaChiChi• 13 years ago

Nuclear key the option. If X votes then X number of moderators have to agree before its closed.

enraged_camel3• 13 years ago

With regards to opinions, I think SO's stance is that they want the site to be a medium to exchange mostly facts, and as little opinion as possible.

The problem with opinions is that, to someone who is not knowledgeable, it may not be immediately clear which opinion holds more weight. In turn, this may end up confusing the reader even more, or worse yet, it may mislead them. This is especially true because even when an opinion is correct, its correctness may be context-sensitive, and this may cause the reader to make the wrong decision based on the correct opinion.

ebrenes• 13 years ago

More often than not the voting is based on opinion in addition to fact. Often the top answer is not only correct but cleaner, more elegant or adheres to some aesthetic quality that's valued by those people voting up the answer.

In software there's many ways to achieve a goal, not a single unique factual answer, thus many answers are context-sensitive and not absolute truths. Sure we can determine to some extent the correctness of the answers, but many of them are contextual and based on factors that are based on opinion/experience.

The voting system in and of itself encourages users to infuse answers with opinion.

angersock6• 13 years ago

The problem with opinions is that, to someone who is not knowledgeable, it may not be immediately clear which opinion holds more weight

If only there was some facility in Stack Overflow to let users add weight to an opinion, either by signaling agreement or explicitly rounding it out with comments--man, that'd be really useful, wouldn't it?

Opinions aren't something that are bad. Facts, especially to somebody that doesn't know what they don't know, are often less useful. If you punish opinions, you also discourage people from answering with extra background on a topic and creating useful discussion.

codinghorror• 13 years ago

Have a read of

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su...

and

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...

If you only click one link here, click the second link.

thedufer3• 13 years ago

I find it incredibly arrogant that a mod can come close a topic that has many upvotes.

Is this actually true? My understanding was that no one could directly close a question, but rather that you can cast close votes (and 5 of them closes a question).

rlpb• 13 years ago

I find it incredibly arrogant that a mod can come close a topic that has many upvotes. It is basically saying to the community that all their opinions count for nothing

What is the distribution of those upvotes against reputation, though? Anybody can upvote. Only users with significant reputations can issue votes to close a question.

If domain experts think that a question should be closed, but an overwhelming number of beginners, non-participants (eg. people viewing the HN front page) or ill-informed think otherwise, then what should happen?

likeclockwork• 13 years ago

What do they mean by 'programming questions you'd solve on a whiteboard'?

Theoretical questions/design questions or..?

I'm confused.

cruise0210• 13 years ago

Programmers is more for design questions. There's a detailed list of guidelines on the Help Center. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic

There's also a Computer Science site for more theoretical questions (http://cs.stackexchange.com/), and Theoretical Computer Science for research-level CS questions (http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/).

Goladus5• 13 years ago

Nearly all of the cases where I've found myself annoyed at someone closing a question are the "off-topic" variety. Most commonly, they are questions asked, answered, upvoted, and google-indexed on StackOverflow and then closed because some mod decided it wasn't programmy enough and should have been asked at ServerFault. Due to the large overlap between programming and system administration, the same question asked at both SO and SF may generate different but equally useful responses tailored to their own communities. It's far too easy for an over-zealous moderator to fail to consider this and close out a question for no good reason.

I'll be interested to see if the new "close reasons" will actually improve this problem. My guess is that it won't and there will still be overly draconian closures of edge-case topics that are relevant to multiple communities.

cruise0210• 13 years ago

Can you share some links to those questions that were wrongly closed? As a general policy, questions that are on topic on Stack Overflow shouldn't be closed just because they might also be on topic on another site. We're aware of the overlap, and we're supposed to allow for it.

Goladus5• 13 years ago

This is the most recent question I was thinking of:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/62222/centos-or-debian-as...

But looking through my history, I was slightly incorrect-- at least one was closed as "not constructive" rather than "off-topic." (I remembered incorrectly because it's true the question is not about programming specifically)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3630506/benefits-of-ebs-v...

The question resulted in answers based on facts and expertise that I found extremely helpful. It was almost exactly what I was looking for when I put the search into google. The question got 161 upvotes and the best answer got 150. The most upvoted answer included 6 factual statements, 1 assertive opinion, and 1 testimonial.

Here's an example of a question closed as off-topic from serverfault. I honestly have no idea why, or where such a question should be asked:

http://serverfault.com/questions/5111/how-to-test-real-netwo...

Once again, I found it on a google search and the first answer had exactly what I was looking for. Minutes later I had downloaded iperf and had used it to run the tests I wanted to run. Yet the question is locked with a disclaimer about how it's only preserved for legacy reasons and it's not on-topic for the site.

To be clear, I don't have a strong preference for where these questions get asked and answered so long as the answers are high-quality and an itinerant surfer like me can find them and active+fruitful discussions don't get permanently squashed because the question caused a red-flag in some moderators pruning algorithm.

trotsky• 13 years ago

If you need that much detail to explain some of the new answers to current users, why such a focus on brevity when the actual ( responses || closes ) are generated? Also in the news today is the NSA FOIA response in which they took one bureaucratic statement "DENIED - CLASSIFIED" and softened it considerably by including a bunch of explanation in the response itself.

StuieK4• 13 years ago

For those who find the closed subjective questions useful, we are trying to build a home for them at slant.co, would love to hear any feedback.

cruise0210• 13 years ago

Stack Overflow moderator here. I love Slant for so many reasons! I'm glad there's a place where people can ask subjective questions. It sucked when people used to ask where they could ask their question and we basically had to respond "not here, try reddit." I also think the design of Slant reinforces the argument that Stack Overflow just isn't built for that kind of question. Well done!

StuieK4• 13 years ago

Thanks mate :)

joelthelion5• 13 years ago

Unfortunately they still haven't understood that "primarily opinion based" questions are valid, very useful and a perfect fit for Stack Overflow.

grimtrigger• 13 years ago

Also, completely impossible to follow. If I ask a question and there's only one answer: then its not opinion based. If there's two possible answers: then the question is opinion based.

Of course, I don't know if it has one answer or two answers. That's why I asked the question!

jackmaney10• 13 years ago

They are not. Take a look at: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/

joelthelion5• 13 years ago

Straw man. Some "primarily opinion based" questions are bad, that doesn't mean that they all are. As long as they are precise, they can be useful.

Of course, they should be handled properly. They should be tagged as such, and managed differently from the other questions. For example, they could expire after a while, at least if they are not renewed.

simonsarris• 13 years ago

"All dupes now must point to an answered question" is a good new rule.

But you know what would be a better rule? Questions with over 50 upvotes cannot be closed as "irrelevant" unless they are moved to a different StackExchange site.

nine_k• 13 years ago

No. The question might be a good text, but a poor question, and a bad flamebait. SO is not a general discussion site.

Closed questions are not deleted, still appear in search results, and sometimes are helpful at that role.

antman• 13 years ago

There goes my foolproof method of finding computing answers on Google: questionhere "closed as not constructive"

dionidium• 13 years ago

These are good changes, but if they insist on closing perfectly valid opinion-based questions, then the text should emphasize that that's their problem, not mine. I didn't do anything wrong. They're the ones making a mistake.

dinkumthinkum• 13 years ago

This comes up now and again on HN. Essentially, StackOverflow is a great site. It's premise was a free, frictionless, focused Q&A site and it was made possible by the wide audiences of Atwood and Spolsky. Atwood focused more on something that went between obscene OCD and just dogma. I think what wasn't realized after the beginning of SO was that SO became a success despite Atwood's ideology, not because of it. I think Joel realized it, just based on the podcasts, but since Atwood was doing most of the work, "whatever." The big problem came in with the ideology becoming enmeshed with the culture and the high council of Meta being sort of a sycophantic keeper of the faith. Basically, any question or answer or anything that might, some day, remotely look like a "discussion" (gasp) on SO is rigidly stamped out by the religious police. You could say this is hyperbole, but just use it for awhile. Heck, google any technical question and probably SO will be the first hit but that question will be marked "Closed, not conforming to the ideology of Atwood" or something like that to the point of being comical.

It's even more farcical when you consider the abject snobbery SO has toward the "other Q&A sites." That has been there from the beginning, and to be sure many of the criticism of those sites are well deserved. But, SO has deeper problems, in some ways, particularly with the zealotry, but it is masked by the fact that there are so many technical people still on SO or, even if many have left, they have gathered such a large corpus that they will remain the big kid on the block.

But at least they are trying to address it, if only at a surface level.

autoreverse• 13 years ago

Would it be an improvement if unanswered questions (or ones with no replies) were hidden from Google?

I find it pretty frustrating when searching a topic and SO's unanswered or closed questions are at top the of SERPs.

Shog9• 13 years ago

We do try to remove unanswered questions after a while, though in the meantime it's important that they're able to be found - after all, someone out there might have an answer.

We're stepping up efforts to remove closed unanswered questions more promptly though, since those won't be answered and just end up being noise in the search results.

For details, see: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/78048/enable-automat...

The War of the Closes

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