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Sometimes a see questions that to me seem to fit the faq but have been closed (this for example). Could there be some way of giving more information or more specific details of why a question is closed in the less obvious cases?

I would feel more confident in voting to close questions if I understood fully why previous examples were closed.

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While the six subjective guidelines cover the question...in question, the closure is actually due to the next part of the close reason:

All questions should be practical, answerable, and of some educational value to the greater community. Chatty, open-ended discussion questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

The question has 53 had answers, which is a good sign that it's open-ended and unanswerable in its current form.

Answerable questions—even subjective ones—should be getting 5 or 6 good answers: that signifies the question was a specific enough scope that there were only so many ways it could be answered correctly.

When you start getting into 20, or 30, or worse yet 50 answers, it's highly unlikely the question was of a specific enough scope for anyone to learn anything from the answers. Nobody's going to read and test 50+ answers to see which one works for them: it's unreasonable. So instead, what you're left with isn't a Q&A pair that solves a problem, but a discussion or a poll of people's opinions about a topic.

More info about this, including Jeff's answer from around the same time the question was closed, is found at:

Too many answers is the sign of a bad question

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In the close reason there is a block of text:

enter image description here

which has two links in it. I've reproduced the text here with the links:

This question does not meet enough of our six guidelines for constructive subjective questions. All questions should be practical, answerable, and of some educational value to the greater community. Chatty, open-ended discussion questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page. See the FAQ.

This pretty much explains why this post was closed.

What more information would you like to see?

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  • In this case it would be nice to see which of the six guidlines were not met. It seems to be 2 and 5 but im not sure.
    – Tom Squires
    Oct 25, 2011 at 13:46
  • @TomSquires - that's up to the closer - in this case Jeff - but the blog post and FAQ should be enough to go on.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Oct 25, 2011 at 13:47
  • I read both the FAQ and the question and it still wasnt clear to me. By blog post do you mean the question or something else?
    – Tom Squires
    Oct 25, 2011 at 13:54
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    @TomSquires - the first link is to a blog post.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Oct 25, 2011 at 13:55

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