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I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answe

by troymc 12y ago

I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?

cheald 12y ago
Can you provide examples of some of those questions? Usually when I encounter that, it's been closed as a duplicate with a link to the original.
- arfliw 12y ago
  Going to be hard to reproduce that bug since they are totally random long tail questions, but I have it happen a lot too FWIW.
  - orbitur 12y ago
    My experience with StackOverflow is that the long-tail questions are still open 2 years later, but lacking any answers.
    - Kalium 12y ago
      Moreover, you'll stumble across them as you search for your own answers.
- gdw2 12y ago
  When searching for the best tool for the job, I often get pointed to SE and the questions are closed as "not constructive". I seem to recall, however, that they opened a separate site for such discussions?
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    "Best tool for the job" doesn't sound like something that should be on SO. Far too subjective and likely to result in stupid opinionated arguments that go nowhere.
    - SoftwareMaven 12y ago
      Except those are the hard questions in software engineering. "How do I draw a triangle with OpenGL?" is an RTFM question. "How do I decide between R and Python?[1]" is a much more challenging, but much more important, question. I've said it before: SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology. The questions that are hard, for real senior software engineers, are rarely found on SE sites. Programmers.SE was supposed to fix it, but it hasn't worked, because of the same moderation. This is a moderation problem, but the solution chosen was the easy solution: just don't allow hard questions because hard questions beget arguments. Instead, requiring people to have civil discourse, perhaps even requiring that people show they can have civil discourse before allowing them to participate, is much, much more difficult. I'm not sure SE could survive the second type of moderation. But by not having it, it certainly makes it usefulness to somebody like me, with many years of experience learning and using various technologies, near zero. 1. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/181342/r-vs-python-for-data-analysis http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/181342/r-vs-p... [closed as off topic]
      - k-mcgrady 12y ago
        >> "SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology." That's what I find in my use and I don't think that's a problem. I think the harder to answer questions should be on their own Stack Exchange system. Moderation on that system would have different rules. I think if you keep it separate the second type of moderation you describe could work, however mixing the two types of moderation with Stack Overflow would lead to more problems imo.
    - smackfu 12y ago
      So instead people just pick whichever thing is first on Google. Is that better?
  - nhzmju 12y ago
    best tool for the job is off topic on Stack Overflow. They did open Software Recommendations Stack Exchange. Closed answers get deleted in some regular interval. If they for some weird reason aren't, you could consider flagging them, there is always a response to that.
    - redler 12y ago
      Next up: "I'm frustrated because my question on Software Recommendations SE was closed for being 'constructive' and 'a real question'".
- jgh 12y ago
  This is an example I ran into recently: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16317075/read-anonymous-json-in-xcode http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16317075/read-anonymous-j... Although the question was framed badly it could have simply been edited to be more clear about what it was asking and what the answers are answering. It was helpful to me and I'm sure it's been helpful to others as well.
  - Shog9 12y ago
    So, edit it then! Even if you don't have an account, there'll be an "improve this question" link right below the question that'll let anyone submit improvements. They'll be reviewed, and, if approved, will immediately submit the question itself to a "reopen review" - if the edits are able to resolve whatever problems existed, it doesn't have to stay closed. It's easy to assume that every reader is able to look past a poorly-written, half-implicit question and suss out the underlying need - but that's not the case. If you're able to understand a question and it's clear that others are not, don't hesitate to share your insights - they can make the difference between a question being downvoted and deleted and one that goes on to help many others.
- dale-cooper 12y ago
  Very often when searching (with google) for subjective things you'll find a closed stackoverflow link high up in the results. I know stackoverflow isn't appropiate for those questions but i still keep going to those results. I understand their position, it's just annoying. This is an example of something i found today: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4674609/looking-for-a-rich-text-editor-that-is-simple http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4674609/looking-for-a-ric...
- Amezarak 12y ago
  Sometimes that's just as bad. Often the questions I see that are closed as "duplicates" are not actually duplicates, just closely related. The answer to one is not always the answer to another. I don't have an SO example on hand, but consider this Sci-Fi StackExchange question: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/79363/why-was-the-ring-necessary-for-sauron-to-control-middle-earth/ http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/79363/why-was-the-r... The question is "Why does Sauron need the Ring to control Middle-Earth?" The correct answer is that he doesn't; he can control Middle-Earth without it, his victory is inevitable, but needs it to remove the only possible method his enemies have of overcoming him. After being correctly answered, the question was flagged as a duplicate of "What was the point of Sauron making the One Ring?" which is a very different question and comes with different answers. This is, in my experience, extremely common across the StackExchange network. In that example, the "duplicate" question was answered before being closed, but that's not always the case.
- gildas 12y ago
  Post a technical question about how to make your single page application crawlable, if it includes the word "SEO", there are great chances it will be closed. Some examples: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21044302/make-ajax-loaded-content-crawlable-by-google http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21044302/make-ajax-loaded... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26298780/how-to-make-ajax-content-indexed-by-google http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26298780/how-to-make-ajax... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14887710/ajax-deep-linking-and-google-indexing-seo-is-it-a-bad-idea http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14887710/ajax-deep-linkin... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21785074/seo-with-single-page-website http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21785074/seo-with-single-... The comment to justify why the question is closed is always the same: "This question appears to be off-topic because it is about SEO".
  - Shog9 12y ago
    Questions that imply you're looking for better ways to spam also tend to fair poorly; can't imagine why. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3905734/how-to-send-100-000-emails-weekly http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3905734/how-to-send-100-0... FWIW, legit SEO questions do have a home on SE: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo
    - gildas 12y ago
      > Questions that imply you're looking for better ways to spam also tend to fair poorly; can't imagine why. I do not follow you. > FWIW, legit SEO questions do have a home on SE: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo I know that Webmasters SE is supposedly the right place to ask questions about crawling issues and Ajax, but in fact you will find more questions on SO (see links below) because this is mainly related to technical issues with JavaScript. 234 questions tagged http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/seo+ajax?sort=newest&pageSize=50 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/seo+ajax?sort=newe... 74 questions tagged http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo+ajax?sort=newest&pageSize=15 http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo+aja...
  - 12y ago
argc 12y ago
Yeah I feel that they are overzealous in closing useful (to me) questions, but its hard to know what the site would be like if they let discussions go--perhaps it would make it a lot more difficult to find the answer you're looking for.
- slantyyz 12y ago
  Because so many questions I've found useful were closed, it has had a chilling effect on my desire to ask questions there. I used to ask questions regularly at the beginning. But now, I feel like my question is probably going to be flagged, so why bother.
nhzmju 12y ago
Having read over 5000( yes really ) questions and searched over 100 with Google, that didn't happen once. Just to clarify, SE doesn't always have the question, but it always has the answer. It must be related to the specific field you are searching for; older ones are usually complete. I wouldn't be surprised if a more casual programming field has a larger ratio of closed answers.
- slantyyz 12y ago
  It seems to happen with certain areas of interest more than others. I would say I encounter them in as much as 30% of my searches, which are web development related. While I understand the intentions of the moderators, they seem to assess the value of a question for people at the moderator's own skill level than at the people who might be asking the question or seeking an answer to a particular question. The silver lining for me is that at least they don't delete the questions and answers they mod down. I've found a lot of useful stuff in questions that the mods didn't like.
  - nhzmju 12y ago
    Thank you for your response, I will comment per paragraph: SE has good rules which keep questions relevant. I would say that if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value. ( There are of course outliers. ) There is a misunderstanding here, moderators on SE don't actually close most of the questions, normal users with privileges to do that, do so by voting. So such a question doesn't have value because users decided so, not moderators. The last paragraph shares the misconception with the previous one. Users vote on and close question. Inf fact moderators are so rare on SE, that they only do critical things that should not be trusted to users, which do the rest.
    - jshen 12y ago
      "if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value." Not fitting the guidelines of SO and not having much value are two very different things. Are you sure you meant the latter?
27182818284 12y ago
This is pretty much my experience. The site is read-only for a lot of people. I think I was rejected the other day because I didn't have the 50 reputation to comment on a reply that had other comments on an older question. They need to lessen restrictions that got too strict out of fear of the site becoming worthless. Right now the scales aren't balanced.
- nhzmju 12y ago
  Comments on SE are meant to be temporary( in their value, not duration ). If you had to raise an important issue about something, you should have instead asked a question about it, where you could leave a link to the problematic answer/question and explain the problem. In fact that is the usual procedure in case of conflicts. There is no restriction on that. If your point is valid, the community does the rest.
  - johansch 12y ago
    ....why?
    - davidism 12y ago
      Most comments should end up as an edit to the question or answer, clarifying some point, at which point they can be removed. The Question and Answer are the important things on Stack Overflow, not the communication that went into creating and tuning them. The remaining comments are just fluff, such as "thanks", which can more appropriately (for the site) be expressed as an upvote or accept. Or they're asking a new question, in which case the parent's comment applies.
      - johansch 12y ago
        This culture doesn't really invite towards answers improving over the years as more and more people who might know more happen to come across them.
        12y ago
yesimahuman 12y ago
The moderation is ridiculous. Useful questions get closed all the time for nebulous "fit" reasons. My opinion is if the community thinks it's a valuable question by voting it up, it should stay.
- blisterpeanuts 12y ago
  I have found some useful information in the "dup" questions. It's a bit weird to discover that a useful answer is "closed as duplicate" but whatever, as long as I keep finding solutions to my problems, I'll keep going back.
  - davidism 12y ago
    The answer was not closed, the question was. This is not a bad thing, as it funnels everything towards one canonical location.
- rtpg 12y ago
  well the moderators are part of the community (voted in!), and have decided its off-topic. So the community did decide to keep the question out.
smackfu 12y ago
More often, I find a question that is closed and frozen in time that does have answers, because the answerers were faster than the moderators. For instance, "Where can I download Spring?" The top Google result is a StackOverflow page that is closed as off-topic.
- nhzmju 12y ago
  The first two results that point to SO, give a useful answer, one is marked as a duplicate and points to the other one with 7 highly upvoted answers. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19124445/how-to-download-spring-framework-zip-file http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19124445/how-to-download-... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19082860/where-can-i-download-spring-framework-jars-without-using-maven http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19082860/where-can-i-down... The question is off-topic, but as you can see it was still answered. Still, to solve that problem, a new site was opened per request of users: Software Recommendations Stack Exchange
  - smackfu 12y ago
    Heh, looks like that was reopened in the last hour.
  - EpicEng 12y ago
    The problem with the new site is that it boasts a tiny fraction of the SO user count. It's just harder to get good answers on a site with so few active users. The same is true for programmers.stackexchange, where code review type questions end up.
- sklivvz1971 12y ago
  Did you try to simply go to the spring tag page? http://stackoverflow.com/tags/spring/info http://stackoverflow.com/tags/spring/info
jordanpg 12y ago
There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-mill developer machismo, and it makes me chuckle every time the first google hit directs me to a SO post with 1000 upvotes that has been closed as "off-topic". It seems self-evident to me that in the year 2015, the internet has allowed me to make more valuable use of my time quickly searching for answers rather than scouring documentation. Docs have a time and a place, but are not needed for quick dips into the myriad techs you need to use to write a typical app these days.
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  Can they not give the macho developers some kind of button that spends some of their points to put a badge on the questions they like, elevating them to "true SO" status? Thats how these things are supposed to work I believe.
  - nsajko 12y ago
    Maybe they won't be able to find the true SO questions if they're buried amongst the lesser quality ones.
  - slantyyz 12y ago
    I always upvote on closed questions that I find useful. This happens more often than it should, imo. What I would think would be better is for questions that receive a lot of upvotes after they are closed, that the people who flagged the question have reduced capability to flag down questions in the future.
- Kalium 12y ago
  The latter group sounds like people who are sick of seeing SO being a place where people are rewarded for regurgitating documentation. I've some sympathy for that.
belorn 12y ago
This has not been my experience when searching for programming questions. The threads I see closed is when I search for "what is the best ...", and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them. Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me.
- EpicEng 12y ago
  > and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them. This is exactly what I don't understand. If a question is borderline, but obviously useful, why not err on the side of allowing it to stand? >Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me. This doesn't happen anymore. The "Homework" tag was removed and is no longer a valid reason to close a question. That doesn't mean these questions don't get closed using other rationals of course.
  - belorn 12y ago
    I can expand why I think SE do not like "what is best ..." questions. 1: There is no definitive answer to it. At best there is best practice, and at worst there is flame wars. If Moderators tried to distinguish what topic could become flame wars, you tend to end up with very biased moderation. 2: Recommendations are much more time-sensitive than purely technical questions. The best framework in 2005 might be abandon in 2015, which can mislead readers. As a reader, I know this and always check the post date, but from a UI perspective, this key component is not obvious in SO. 3: Flame wars are destructive, and SE has historically tried to avoid them. Questions like "should I pick GPL or BSD?", "Emacs or VI?", and "Python or ruby?" tend to be cut down before they cause problem in the SE community. I wish sometimes that HN would follow suit and do the same.
    - EpicEng 12y ago
      I think it depends. "What is the best image processing library?" should be closed. However, if that person goes on to detail what exactly they are trying to do and what constraints they are working with, it may not be so open-ended anymore. And this is only an example of one type of question which is routinely closed. There are others.
billbowery 12y ago
Yes, I've run into this problem regularly.
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
Have you seen the ads? If you did, it's not broken from their point of view.
nashequilibrium 12y ago
That pissed me off so many times that once the mods actucally got into an argument over whether my question should be allowed, that was the last time i ever posted or answered a question on SE. That being said that site is super helpful, i just wish they could make the moderators more tolerable. You would be surprised how many times a question is closed yet will have so many upvotes and answers. Interestingly i have noticed that Quora has some nice thoughtful answers to tech questions, especially questions that have no shot in hell of being answered on SE.
egocodedinsol 12y ago
somehow this ends up on every thread about SO. I sometimes feel as if there could be a thread titled 'SO pivots into airplanes' and the top comment would be about whether flight attendants would call some questions off topic.
grkvlt 12y ago
> I often [find] a question on [...] Stack Exchange [but] some moderator [has] closed it before it got answered. How often is often in practice, though? This is a common objection, and I see it mentioned a lot by disgruntled commenters here. This is just another form of observational bias, and in reality the situaion described is pretty rare... There are many times that SO and SE sites have been useful to me, both is finding answers to existing questions, asking questions that are then answered, and also providing answers myself. I agree that it can be infuriating to see a question that you want answered on the site, but it has been closed as 'off topic' or 'irrelevant' or the classic 'not suitable for a question-and-answer format site.' However, this has not happened to me much in the several years I have used the site(s) so I have to assume one of the following is true: a. I only ask/search for the 'right' kinds of questions? b. Closed questions are not that common? Due to the annoyance factor, I think that b. is what is happening, and people just weight those occurrences much higher in their subconcious. That means they will recall them more readily, thus giving the false impression that it happens a lot. This is actually a very common observational bias, which people should be more aware of. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic The availability heuristic is the idea that if something can be readily recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternatives which are not as readily recalled. The easier it is to recall the consequences of something the greater those consequences are often perceived to be, and similarly the greater the consequences the easier somehing is to recall. This means strong negative associations with closed answers make those easy to remember, and people incorrectly estimate the frequency of this situation to be much greater than it actually is.
code_duck 12y ago
It's hard to even research certain topics these days without google leading to a useless stackoverflow page. Yes, most questions have been 'answered'... But years ago and those aren't the ones Google leads to. The overall quality of stack overflow has decreased dramatically over the past few years. These days, when I go there mostly I have the chance to help someone from India do his or her job and tell people to stop using obsolete database interfaces and leaving their code wide-open to SQL injection. It's not very rewarding, educational, useful or entertaining.

by troymc 12y ago

cheald 12y ago

Can you provide examples of some of those questions? Usually when I encounter that, it's been closed as a duplicate with a link to the original.

arfliw 12y ago
Going to be hard to reproduce that bug since they are totally random long tail questions, but I have it happen a lot too FWIW.
- orbitur 12y ago
  My experience with StackOverflow is that the long-tail questions are still open 2 years later, but lacking any answers.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    Moreover, you'll stumble across them as you search for your own answers.
gdw2 12y ago
When searching for the best tool for the job, I often get pointed to SE and the questions are closed as "not constructive". I seem to recall, however, that they opened a separate site for such discussions?
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  "Best tool for the job" doesn't sound like something that should be on SO. Far too subjective and likely to result in stupid opinionated arguments that go nowhere.
  - SoftwareMaven 12y ago
    Except those are the hard questions in software engineering. "How do I draw a triangle with OpenGL?" is an RTFM question. "How do I decide between R and Python?[1]" is a much more challenging, but much more important, question. I've said it before: SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology. The questions that are hard, for real senior software engineers, are rarely found on SE sites. Programmers.SE was supposed to fix it, but it hasn't worked, because of the same moderation. This is a moderation problem, but the solution chosen was the easy solution: just don't allow hard questions because hard questions beget arguments. Instead, requiring people to have civil discourse, perhaps even requiring that people show they can have civil discourse before allowing them to participate, is much, much more difficult. I'm not sure SE could survive the second type of moderation. But by not having it, it certainly makes it usefulness to somebody like me, with many years of experience learning and using various technologies, near zero. 1. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/181342/r-vs-python-for-data-analysis http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/181342/r-vs-p... [closed as off topic]
    - k-mcgrady 12y ago
      >> "SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology." That's what I find in my use and I don't think that's a problem. I think the harder to answer questions should be on their own Stack Exchange system. Moderation on that system would have different rules. I think if you keep it separate the second type of moderation you describe could work, however mixing the two types of moderation with Stack Overflow would lead to more problems imo.
  - smackfu 12y ago
    So instead people just pick whichever thing is first on Google. Is that better?
- nhzmju 12y ago
  best tool for the job is off topic on Stack Overflow. They did open Software Recommendations Stack Exchange. Closed answers get deleted in some regular interval. If they for some weird reason aren't, you could consider flagging them, there is always a response to that.
  - redler 12y ago
    Next up: "I'm frustrated because my question on Software Recommendations SE was closed for being 'constructive' and 'a real question'".
jgh 12y ago
This is an example I ran into recently: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16317075/read-anonymous-json-in-xcode http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16317075/read-anonymous-j... Although the question was framed badly it could have simply been edited to be more clear about what it was asking and what the answers are answering. It was helpful to me and I'm sure it's been helpful to others as well.
- Shog9 12y ago
  So, edit it then! Even if you don't have an account, there'll be an "improve this question" link right below the question that'll let anyone submit improvements. They'll be reviewed, and, if approved, will immediately submit the question itself to a "reopen review" - if the edits are able to resolve whatever problems existed, it doesn't have to stay closed. It's easy to assume that every reader is able to look past a poorly-written, half-implicit question and suss out the underlying need - but that's not the case. If you're able to understand a question and it's clear that others are not, don't hesitate to share your insights - they can make the difference between a question being downvoted and deleted and one that goes on to help many others.
dale-cooper 12y ago
Very often when searching (with google) for subjective things you'll find a closed stackoverflow link high up in the results. I know stackoverflow isn't appropiate for those questions but i still keep going to those results. I understand their position, it's just annoying. This is an example of something i found today: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4674609/looking-for-a-rich-text-editor-that-is-simple http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4674609/looking-for-a-ric...
Amezarak 12y ago
Sometimes that's just as bad. Often the questions I see that are closed as "duplicates" are not actually duplicates, just closely related. The answer to one is not always the answer to another. I don't have an SO example on hand, but consider this Sci-Fi StackExchange question: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/79363/why-was-the-ring-necessary-for-sauron-to-control-middle-earth/ http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/79363/why-was-the-r... The question is "Why does Sauron need the Ring to control Middle-Earth?" The correct answer is that he doesn't; he can control Middle-Earth without it, his victory is inevitable, but needs it to remove the only possible method his enemies have of overcoming him. After being correctly answered, the question was flagged as a duplicate of "What was the point of Sauron making the One Ring?" which is a very different question and comes with different answers. This is, in my experience, extremely common across the StackExchange network. In that example, the "duplicate" question was answered before being closed, but that's not always the case.
gildas 12y ago
Post a technical question about how to make your single page application crawlable, if it includes the word "SEO", there are great chances it will be closed. Some examples: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21044302/make-ajax-loaded-content-crawlable-by-google http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21044302/make-ajax-loaded... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26298780/how-to-make-ajax-content-indexed-by-google http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26298780/how-to-make-ajax... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14887710/ajax-deep-linking-and-google-indexing-seo-is-it-a-bad-idea http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14887710/ajax-deep-linkin... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21785074/seo-with-single-page-website http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21785074/seo-with-single-... The comment to justify why the question is closed is always the same: "This question appears to be off-topic because it is about SEO".
- Shog9 12y ago
  Questions that imply you're looking for better ways to spam also tend to fair poorly; can't imagine why. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3905734/how-to-send-100-000-emails-weekly http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3905734/how-to-send-100-0... FWIW, legit SEO questions do have a home on SE: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo
  - gildas 12y ago
    > Questions that imply you're looking for better ways to spam also tend to fair poorly; can't imagine why. I do not follow you. > FWIW, legit SEO questions do have a home on SE: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo I know that Webmasters SE is supposedly the right place to ask questions about crawling issues and Ajax, but in fact you will find more questions on SO (see links below) because this is mainly related to technical issues with JavaScript. 234 questions tagged http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/seo+ajax?sort=newest&pageSize=50 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/seo+ajax?sort=newe... 74 questions tagged http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo+ajax?sort=newest&pageSize=15 http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo+aja...
- 12y ago

argc 12y ago

Yeah I feel that they are overzealous in closing useful (to me) questions, but its hard to know what the site would be like if they let discussions go--perhaps it would make it a lot more difficult to find the answer you're looking for.

slantyyz 12y ago
Because so many questions I've found useful were closed, it has had a chilling effect on my desire to ask questions there. I used to ask questions regularly at the beginning. But now, I feel like my question is probably going to be flagged, so why bother.

nhzmju 12y ago

Having read over 5000( yes really ) questions and searched over 100 with Google, that didn't happen once. Just to clarify, SE doesn't always have the question, but it always has the answer. It must be related to the specific field you are searching for; older ones are usually complete. I wouldn't be surprised if a more casual programming field has a larger ratio of closed answers.

slantyyz 12y ago
It seems to happen with certain areas of interest more than others. I would say I encounter them in as much as 30% of my searches, which are web development related. While I understand the intentions of the moderators, they seem to assess the value of a question for people at the moderator's own skill level than at the people who might be asking the question or seeking an answer to a particular question. The silver lining for me is that at least they don't delete the questions and answers they mod down. I've found a lot of useful stuff in questions that the mods didn't like.
- nhzmju 12y ago
  Thank you for your response, I will comment per paragraph: SE has good rules which keep questions relevant. I would say that if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value. ( There are of course outliers. ) There is a misunderstanding here, moderators on SE don't actually close most of the questions, normal users with privileges to do that, do so by voting. So such a question doesn't have value because users decided so, not moderators. The last paragraph shares the misconception with the previous one. Users vote on and close question. Inf fact moderators are so rare on SE, that they only do critical things that should not be trusted to users, which do the rest.
  - jshen 12y ago
    "if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value." Not fitting the guidelines of SO and not having much value are two very different things. Are you sure you meant the latter?

27182818284 12y ago

This is pretty much my experience. The site is read-only for a lot of people. I think I was rejected the other day because I didn't have the 50 reputation to comment on a reply that had other comments on an older question. They need to lessen restrictions that got too strict out of fear of the site becoming worthless. Right now the scales aren't balanced.

nhzmju 12y ago
Comments on SE are meant to be temporary( in their value, not duration ). If you had to raise an important issue about something, you should have instead asked a question about it, where you could leave a link to the problematic answer/question and explain the problem. In fact that is the usual procedure in case of conflicts. There is no restriction on that. If your point is valid, the community does the rest.
- johansch 12y ago
  ....why?
  - davidism 12y ago
    Most comments should end up as an edit to the question or answer, clarifying some point, at which point they can be removed. The Question and Answer are the important things on Stack Overflow, not the communication that went into creating and tuning them. The remaining comments are just fluff, such as "thanks", which can more appropriately (for the site) be expressed as an upvote or accept. Or they're asking a new question, in which case the parent's comment applies.
    - johansch 12y ago
      This culture doesn't really invite towards answers improving over the years as more and more people who might know more happen to come across them.
      - 12y ago

yesimahuman 12y ago

The moderation is ridiculous. Useful questions get closed all the time for nebulous "fit" reasons. My opinion is if the community thinks it's a valuable question by voting it up, it should stay.

blisterpeanuts 12y ago
I have found some useful information in the "dup" questions. It's a bit weird to discover that a useful answer is "closed as duplicate" but whatever, as long as I keep finding solutions to my problems, I'll keep going back.
- davidism 12y ago
  The answer was not closed, the question was. This is not a bad thing, as it funnels everything towards one canonical location.
rtpg 12y ago
well the moderators are part of the community (voted in!), and have decided its off-topic. So the community did decide to keep the question out.

smackfu 12y ago

More often, I find a question that is closed and frozen in time that does have answers, because the answerers were faster than the moderators. For instance, "Where can I download Spring?" The top Google result is a StackOverflow page that is closed as off-topic.

nhzmju 12y ago
The first two results that point to SO, give a useful answer, one is marked as a duplicate and points to the other one with 7 highly upvoted answers. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19124445/how-to-download-spring-framework-zip-file http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19124445/how-to-download-... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19082860/where-can-i-download-spring-framework-jars-without-using-maven http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19082860/where-can-i-down... The question is off-topic, but as you can see it was still answered. Still, to solve that problem, a new site was opened per request of users: Software Recommendations Stack Exchange
- smackfu 12y ago
  Heh, looks like that was reopened in the last hour.
- EpicEng 12y ago
  The problem with the new site is that it boasts a tiny fraction of the SO user count. It's just harder to get good answers on a site with so few active users. The same is true for programmers.stackexchange, where code review type questions end up.
sklivvz1971 12y ago
Did you try to simply go to the spring tag page? http://stackoverflow.com/tags/spring/info http://stackoverflow.com/tags/spring/info

jordanpg 12y ago

There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-mill developer machismo, and it makes me chuckle every time the first google hit directs me to a SO post with 1000 upvotes that has been closed as "off-topic". It seems self-evident to me that in the year 2015, the internet has allowed me to make more valuable use of my time quickly searching for answers rather than scouring documentation. Docs have a time and a place, but are not needed for quick dips into the myriad techs you need to use to write a typical app these days.

JonnieCache 12y ago
Can they not give the macho developers some kind of button that spends some of their points to put a badge on the questions they like, elevating them to "true SO" status? Thats how these things are supposed to work I believe.
- nsajko 12y ago
  Maybe they won't be able to find the true SO questions if they're buried amongst the lesser quality ones.
- slantyyz 12y ago
  I always upvote on closed questions that I find useful. This happens more often than it should, imo. What I would think would be better is for questions that receive a lot of upvotes after they are closed, that the people who flagged the question have reduced capability to flag down questions in the future.
Kalium 12y ago
The latter group sounds like people who are sick of seeing SO being a place where people are rewarded for regurgitating documentation. I've some sympathy for that.

belorn 12y ago

This has not been my experience when searching for programming questions. The threads I see closed is when I search for "what is the best ...", and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them. Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me.

EpicEng 12y ago
> and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them. This is exactly what I don't understand. If a question is borderline, but obviously useful, why not err on the side of allowing it to stand? >Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me. This doesn't happen anymore. The "Homework" tag was removed and is no longer a valid reason to close a question. That doesn't mean these questions don't get closed using other rationals of course.
- belorn 12y ago
  I can expand why I think SE do not like "what is best ..." questions. 1: There is no definitive answer to it. At best there is best practice, and at worst there is flame wars. If Moderators tried to distinguish what topic could become flame wars, you tend to end up with very biased moderation. 2: Recommendations are much more time-sensitive than purely technical questions. The best framework in 2005 might be abandon in 2015, which can mislead readers. As a reader, I know this and always check the post date, but from a UI perspective, this key component is not obvious in SO. 3: Flame wars are destructive, and SE has historically tried to avoid them. Questions like "should I pick GPL or BSD?", "Emacs or VI?", and "Python or ruby?" tend to be cut down before they cause problem in the SE community. I wish sometimes that HN would follow suit and do the same.
  - EpicEng 12y ago
    I think it depends. "What is the best image processing library?" should be closed. However, if that person goes on to detail what exactly they are trying to do and what constraints they are working with, it may not be so open-ended anymore. And this is only an example of one type of question which is routinely closed. There are others.

billbowery 12y ago

Yes, I've run into this problem regularly.

stefantalpalaru 12y ago

Have you seen the ads? If you did, it's not broken from their point of view.

nashequilibrium 12y ago

That pissed me off so many times that once the mods actucally got into an argument over whether my question should be allowed, that was the last time i ever posted or answered a question on SE. That being said that site is super helpful, i just wish they could make the moderators more tolerable. You would be surprised how many times a question is closed yet will have so many upvotes and answers. Interestingly i have noticed that Quora has some nice thoughtful answers to tech questions, especially questions that have no shot in hell of being answered on SE.

egocodedinsol 12y ago

somehow this ends up on every thread about SO. I sometimes feel as if there could be a thread titled 'SO pivots into airplanes' and the top comment would be about whether flight attendants would call some questions off topic.

grkvlt 12y ago

> I often [find] a question on [...] Stack Exchange [but] some moderator [has] closed it before it got answered. How often is often in practice, though? This is a common objection, and I see it mentioned a lot by disgruntled commenters here. This is just another form of observational bias, and in reality the situaion described is pretty rare... There are many times that SO and SE sites have been useful to me, both is finding answers to existing questions, asking questions that are then answered, and also providing answers myself. I agree that it can be infuriating to see a question that you want answered on the site, but it has been closed as 'off topic' or 'irrelevant' or the classic 'not suitable for a question-and-answer format site.' However, this has not happened to me much in the several years I have used the site(s) so I have to assume one of the following is true: a. I only ask/search for the 'right' kinds of questions? b. Closed questions are not that common? Due to the annoyance factor, I think that b. is what is happening, and people just weight those occurrences much higher in their subconcious. That means they will recall them more readily, thus giving the false impression that it happens a lot. This is actually a very common observational bias, which people should be more aware of. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic The availability heuristic is the idea that if something can be readily recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternatives which are not as readily recalled. The easier it is to recall the consequences of something the greater those consequences are often perceived to be, and similarly the greater the consequences the easier somehing is to recall. This means strong negative associations with closed answers make those easy to remember, and people incorrectly estimate the frequency of this situation to be much greater than it actually is.

code_duck 12y ago

It's hard to even research certain topics these days without google leading to a useless stackoverflow page. Yes, most questions have been 'answered'... But years ago and those aren't the ones Google leads to. The overall quality of stack overflow has decreased dramatically over the past few years. These days, when I go there mostly I have the chance to help someone from India do his or her job and tell people to stop using obsolete database interfaces and leaving their code wide-open to SQL injection. It's not very rewarding, educational, useful or entertaining.