Why was my question closed or down voted?

Question

Help! My question was closed (or down voted). Why? And what can I do about it?

Downvoted
Duplicate
Off topic
Unclear
Too broad
Primarily opinion-based
Other
certification, homework, interview, current events, cross-posting etc...

Three of categories listed under Off topic match site-specific close reasons, see: What should our predefined off-topic reasons be?

The answers below try to summarize the issue and provide links to related content that helped shape the policies. Realize that many of the links are from particular points in the history of Software Engineering (previously known as Programmers.SE) and while they have good advice and ideas in them, policies described in 2010 may not be the same as 2014 and beyond.

_{Please note: There are quite a few of my answers in this question. Up voting (or down voting) them all in one go may lead to a serial vote reversal. If this happens, it makes it even harder for you to vote on other things I may have written elsewhere on this meta. In that light, please limit your voting on this question and its answers.}

_{For pasting into chat or comments there is a "Quick link" at the end of each answer. The quick link for the question is [Why was my question closed or down voted?](https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6483/) - pasting this into chat or a comment will link to the question.}

had questions closed for ops not capable of reading and understanding them - or failed bounties for ops not able to reproduce the results. the only effect it has is, that one may realize, that time can be used more meaningful. — Martin Zeitler, Commented Mar 12, 2014 at 23:18
@ChrisCirefice thank you. Each StackExchange has its own nuances of understanding the various close reasons and P.SE is no exception there. These interpretations are often found scattered through meta and it can be difficult for someone to grasp all that history from just the close reason summary, and thus the attempt to pull it all together. If someone reads this early on in their P.SE asking career, they may find it possible to avoid many of the common problems and close reasons that we face and thus ask better questions from the start. — user40980, Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 18:11
@MichaelT Exactly - my first question here was closed & deleted - I went to chat to figure out why and it was fine. This post didn't exist back then :P I think every SE site should have a stickied (FAQ'd) page like this to help out new users. I don't think a lot of them do, unfortunately =/ — Chris Cirefice, Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 19:17
Compared to other SE sites, Programmers is special. It is one of the older sites, and it has gone through iterations regarding its content. Most of the sites in this network started with highly focused goals, and have not changed course in the middle like Programmers has. That seems to make Programmers more difficult to grok for most new members. — user22815, Commented Nov 2, 2014 at 4:05
@Snowman I wouldn't say middle, but it had a very disruptive bit in the early part of its history (within weeks of going to public beta). However, a fair bit of the "this is what programmers is" for people who don't participate was set down during that period. The idea that we still are that "Not Programming Related" site lingers on in quite a few minds (regularly sending questions for "this doesn't fit on Stack Overflow, try on Prorammers.SE"). Some seem to think that P.SE is the worldbuilding.SE version of SO where one can throw anything at the wall to see if it sticks. — user40980, Commented Nov 2, 2014 at 4:13
@MichaelT perhaps "middle" was the wrong word. Regardless, the fact is that many old questions linger on this site that are poor examples of questions under the new contents of the help center. Someone can search first (good!), find a poor quality question that was not closed and did receive positive attention (votes, answers), ask a similar question, then wonder why it is downvoted and closed. — user22815, Commented Nov 2, 2014 at 4:17

15 revs, 4 users 63% user40980 · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-16 10:01:31Z

Off Topic

Career or education advice

Questions seeking career or education advice are off topic here. They are only meaningful to the asker and do not generate lasting value for the broader programming community. Furthermore, in most cases, any answer is going to be a subjective opinion that may not take into account all the nuances of a (your) particular circumstance.

Career advice questions are only applicable to the person asking the question. No two people are looking at the same set of classes, or the same job. Every question that is asked is either only for one person or the answers will always be hopelessly incomplete because of the lack of the nuanced information and context that the person asking the question is in.

Career questions are often very important questions to the person asking them. Although assistance can be provided, the answer is one that you need to find yourself, and not from random strangers on the Internet. If you are in academia, ask a career counselor at the school, or one of the instructors - they know you better than we do. Similar resources can be found for people in the job market already.

One of the biggest difficulties with Q&A for career questions is that to get the nuances of your situation and getting to know you better requires a dense two way communication - lots of clarification back and forth. To this end, chat is a resource where (the current) denizens can have that conversation. We still won't get to know you as well as people who know you know you, but on the whole we are familiar with the various parts of the software industry.

Please also note that we are notoriously bad at predicting the future. If you had asked someone if Objective C was going to be a popular language (prior to the iPhone) they would have looked at you funny ("Apple has less than a 2% market share - who would use it?") - yet it became a very popular language and subsequently fell out of favor once Apple switched to Swift. Or if you asked about running JavaScript outside of the web browser they would have laughed at you. Technology is changing at an incredible rate and to ask about what it will be in another decade? Your guess is as good as mine... maybe better (its less hampered by a few decades of industry preconceptions).

Asking questions to predict the future job market and what skills are best is completely speculation and cannot have any right answer.

Too Broad

The question you have asked either:

has too many possible answers
would require answers that are too long.

Polling / Big List of Things

Some questions are just polls for a design, or pattern, or name of a thing. If the accepted answer is based on "which answer I like best," rather than "which answer solves my problem," the question is probably a poll.

While some other Stack Exchanges allow it, Software Engineering SE frowns upon 'big list' type questions that seem to want to compile a list of things. Questions that fall into this category typically have the form of:

What are all the problems I will encounter with XYZ?
What are the pros and cons of XYZ?
How can XYZ be used?
Any ideas?

Questions like these don't pose a problem that can be solved by an answer. There is no definitive right answer that someone can go to, see the accepted answer and say "yep, that is the answer."

Too long

Can someone explain Java to me?

This question is too broad. There is far too much in Java to explain it to a person. While long and complete answers are a good thing, questions that would require books to answer completely don't make good questions.

Often these questions can be resolved by spending some time thinking about what the core problem is or what the first problem you are running into is.

Off Topic

What technology to take up next

Questions about what language, technology, or project one should take up next are off topic on Software Engineering.SE, as they can only attract subjective opinions for answers. There are too many individual factors behind the question to create answers that will have lasting value. You may be able to get help in The Whiteboard, our chat room.

There is a constant stream of new projects out there. Github claims 4,500 new projects a day back in 2011. On December 23, 2013, Github had 10 million repositories. Quite frankly, there are far too many projects for anyone to suggest a good answer. What's more, the projects of yesteryear may well be inactive now.

The same problem exists for suggesting languages and technologies - they are constantly changing. Further, many questions of this type often just ask "which one is best" without specifying any requirements, making them essentially a popularity poll. If you really do want a popularity poll, consider reading The Top Programming Languages: IEEE Spectrum’s 2014 Ranking which takes into account such things as Github active projects, Stack Overflow questions, Reddit questions, Hacker News, and job postings (see the 'custom' ranking for working with weightings).

A goal for Stack Exchange is to create a lasting repository of information. Asking questions about which technology to chose runs counter to that. In part because everyone's needs are different and also that everyone has their own favorites.

Primarily opinion-based

Good questions ask for expertise, not opinions. Examples of questions that are primarily opinion-based:

"What did this person mean when he said..." (We're not mind-readers)
"Which of these two designs is the better one?" (what do you mean by "better?")
"How should I arrange the folders in my project?" (really?)
"Is this the best practice?" (what do you mean by "best?")
"What is the name of this thing so I can go look it up?" (Ask us your specific question about the thing)

The key distinguishing factor is that there is no way to get an authoritative answer for the question - the answers are all based on opinion rather than the knowledge of the person answering the question.

Consider that if the answers to the question of:

I like ${design A} for these reasons

I like ${design B} for these other reasons

If both of these answers are valid then the question is likely opinion based.

Unclear what you are asking

What you are looking for, in the context of Software Engineering SE is unclear.

This close reason can also be a bit unclear as to what the issue is. Please be sure to:

Give enough context that someone reading the question can understand it
Explain what you are looking for
Check to make sure you are not using jargon that is particular to one specific branch of computing (and if you are, either change the jargon or link to a site that explains it)
Check that there are no hidden assumption or "leaps of thought" in your question. They might be obvious to you, but they won't be to the wider community. It is often better to spell it all out explicitly, even if you think it is blindingly obvious.
Make sure you are on the proper site

The last point is important too. This close reason is often used as a proxy for "we don't think that this question is a good question for Software Engineering SE (it might be on Stack Overflow), but would get closed there too."

Explain your design. Explain what you have done. Explain where you are having difficulty. Explain what you are looking for.

Other

Questions can be closed with a custom reason. These are found in the comments for the question. To that extent it is difficult to enumerate all the possible reasons people may try to close a question.

The essence of Software Engineering SE was summed up in chat by Thomas Owens:

Picture Software Engineering like a small conference room with a whiteboard. No computer, no books, no papers. You write your question on the whiteboard and experts walk by. Someone sees one that they can answer, they stop in and help.

Read the explanation.

Duplicate questions

A duplicate question in and of itself isn't a bad thing. Often it means that the people who have suggested it as such think that the answer to your question is already in the original question. Questions are closed as duplicates because we want future readers to be able to go to one place to find the answer.

Make sure you read all of the answers on the original question and consider the implications behind the answers too - not just the first reading. An example of this can be seen on Stack Overflow when debugging questions trying to track down a NullPointerException in Java are linked to a question that explains about NullPointerExceptions rather than trying to resolve that particular instance.

If you feel that something is closed as a duplicate incorrectly, edit your question to explain specifically how it differs from the other question and the answers in the duplicate question do not apply to your situation.

Off Topic

Recommend tools, libraries, programming languages, resources (including books, blogs, tutorials, and examples), or projects to undertake

Questions asking us to find or recommend tools, libraries, programming languages, resources (including books, blogs, tutorials, and examples), or projects to undertake are off-topic here as they attract opinionated answers that won't have lasting value to others. You may be able to get help in The Whiteboard, our chat room.

Stack Exchange is not designed to be a book, library, or link review site. It just doesn't work well that way. Asking for libraries and tools often attracts spam answers where the person answering it just drops a link to some library in an answer, without explaining anything.

Try libXYZ.

Questions like "What is the best book to learn Java from" are incredibly broad, polling questions that have no right answer, only opinions. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of books on Java. Often times these books become outdated as fast as the technology does.

We do book review and suggestions poorly

One of the classic recommendation questions is that of a book.

We do book reviews very poorly. All the answers that one gets are opinions and this is fundamentally a poll of opinions. This is to say nothing of that the technology behind them changes too. There are indeed timeless books (and many have written on the subject), though their value is a matter of debate.

Between the polling nature of the question, the opinions people have on certain books, the constantly changing target, and the site's history of producing poor quality answers to these questions (and not moderating them), asking for a book suggestion is very likely to get closed and down voted.

Asking for a link to something or statistics

This is a subtler meaning of the 'favorite off-site resource' part of the wording of the close reason. Asking a question that doesn't draw upon the community's expert knowledge as programmers but rather asking it to be a crowdsourced search engine falls into this area.

Links to things suffer from link rot. Statistics become out of date over time. Neither of these contribute significantly to the collective knowledge of problem solving that the Q&A format provides.

An example of this is someone asking in 2012 "What is the market share of Android vs iPhone?" This information would be out of date in a few months as new numbers come out and someone else would ask in 2013 "The question [link] asks about the stats, but they are all for 2012. What is the market share for android vs iPhone in 2013?" And again, this information would be out of date and prompt another question.

Asking for information about statistics, or more generally, asking us to search for some data for you is off topic because of these problems:

No actual problem to solve
Not drawing from expert knowledge of the community
Will suffer from link rot or become out of date

Link Rot

Furthermore, external resources may move or be deleted for a variety of reasons. Perhaps a particular site reorganizes its links without setting up redirects. Perhaps an organization goes out of business or discontinues product X or library Y.

In addition to the reasons stated above, external resources tend to be transient. Whatever tool, library, or other resource who requested might not exist in five years or be otherwise readily available. This has the effect of making an answer utterly useless.

If one asks for a library to perform function X, and the answer links to web site Y, and either function X or web site Y cease to exist as defined in the answer, that answer is now useless.

This is one more reason why questions like this tend to be of low value and are off-topic.

Is there a place where I can ask such questions?

Asking for software recommendations is on topic at Software Recommendations. However, if you decide to repost the question on that site, the required information for posting a question has a much higher threshold. From the ground rules and What is required for a question to contain “enough information”, you will need to describe your specific need in detail. If you are unsure how to frame such a question, please ask in the SoftwareRec chatroom before posting.

Downvoted

The first thing to look at is the mouseover for the down vote button.

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful

Realize that this is a completely subjective grading and people may down vote because they were late to work or don't like unicorns. However one's feeling of unicorns, this is information for you to look at and consider how to improve the question.

Make sure that the question is not just asking for something that can be easily searched with google.

Asking other people to do your searching for you is considered poor form. Everyone answering questions is doing so on a volunteer basis (even the SE employees that sometimes answer questions - they aren't paid to do so).

This also extends to things that you should have been able to find when searching on Software Engineering SE. As you enter the information be sure to tag the question appropriately. The combination of tags and title may help you find something right away that answers the question.

Explain your current understanding of the issue

Just saying "Could someone explain ${concept} to me" doesn't show what you do understand. It lacks research. Often the answer to this is spent repeating what is already available in Wikipedia. If you had read this already and don't understand a part of it, explain that part and what you do understand. Correcting a misconception is easier (and a better question) than trying to explain the entire topic.

Blatantly off topic

Make sure you read the help center on on-topic and off-topic questions. Questions that are asking for a discussion, or polling or one of the reasons specified in the help center are often down voted. Especially note that questions should have been posted on Stack Overflow (implementation) or questions that should have been posted on Stack Overflow, but would be off topic there too (do this work for me) are similarly often down voted.

Off topic

Assistance in writing or debugging existing code

Questions asking for assistance in writing or debugging existing code are off-topic here. These questions can be asked on Stack Overflow if they include the desired behavior, a specific problem or error, and the shortest code necessary to reproduce it in the question itself. See How To Create a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable Example.

Asking for debugging help or “how do I write this specific code” type questions are off topic on Software Engineering SE.

These questions have a site that is completely focused on them – Stack Overflow. Trying to answer them here reduces the usefulness of Stack Overflow (now you have to search two sites for the same information), and makes it harder to find the software architecture and design questions that Software Engineering SE focuses on.

If you are having trouble posting a question on Stack Overflow, and have come to Software Engineering SE as a way to get around that, look very closely at the quality of the post.

Make sure the words are all spelled correctly, and punctuation is properly used (see Spell Check plus.com as one of many online grammar checkers).
Make sure that the code is formatted correctly (see Markdown help if you are having trouble with this).
Make sure that the title of the question is a good title that describes the actual problem: “Why can't I use == to compare strings” is a better title than “Help, I have a question about compilers”.

Software Engineering SE is reluctant to migrate questions to Stack Overflow that would result in the question being closed there too. The reasons on SO are covered in What topics can I ask about here? in the SO help center. In particular, a “why isn't this code working” question about debugging existing code needs to thoroughly and completely describe the problem – nobody can guess what you're trying to do.

Neither Software Engineering SE nor Stack Overflow is a code writing service. Questions asking someone to write code from scratch (or from some requirements provided) will be closed on both sites.

If you are blocked from asking questions on Stack Overflow, please do not ask them here in an attempt to get around the block. Both Software Engineering SE and Stack Overflow have automatic question bans in place. Asking off topic questions here will get them closed. Even if it's a good question that might be migrated to Stack Overflow because it wouldn't get closed – the system prevents us from migrating those.

Off topic

Legal Advice or Aid

Questions asking for legal advice or aid are off-topic here. You may be able to get help with understanding, applying, and complying with free and open licenses on Open Source. You may be able to get help with legal terms, concepts, language, and procedures on Law.

Software is generally covered by copyright: even the lack of copyright (e.g. public domain) is important. When software is covered by copyright, it is often licensed to end users or other developers when it is distributed.

This is a very important topic: as software professionals, it is incumbent on us to ensure that we comply with the legal requirements of copyright law and software licenses. We may also be interested in our own rights under copyright law as well as finding a license for our own software that meets our needs.

Software Engineering SE is primarily concerned with the software lifecycle, not legal issues. Furthermore, many people are simply not qualified to dispense advice that borders on or falls into the legal realm: nor would any sane person do so on a web site even if qualified.

Further compounding the lack of legal expertise is the fact that the internet is a global entity, with developers in numerous legal jurisdictions. Much like with career and education advice, there are simply too many variables to give an answer to a question in a way that works for the Q&A format in the majority of cases. Even if we could dispense quality legal advice or aid, it would be far too localized to be suitable for this site.

Software Engineering SE can give advice on licensing questions that requires the expert knowledge of a programmer as opposed to a lawyer. However, Open Source is generally a much better resource for licensing questions.

If a question seeks information about copyright law but is not seeking legal advice, Law may be an appropriate site on which to ask.

Why was my question closed or down voted?

11 Answers 11

Off Topic

Career or education advice

Related reading

Too Broad

Polling / Big List of Things

Too long

Related reading

Off Topic

What technology to take up next

Related reading

Primarily opinion-based

Related reading

Unclear what you are asking

Related reading

Other

Related reading

Duplicate questions

Related reading

Off Topic

Recommend tools, libraries, programming languages, resources (including books, blogs, tutorials, and examples), or projects to undertake

We do book review and suggestions poorly

Asking for a link to something or statistics

Link Rot

Is there a place where I can ask such questions?

Related reading

Downvoted

Make sure that the question is not just asking for something that can be easily searched with google.

Explain your current understanding of the issue

Blatantly off topic

Related reading

Off topic

Assistance in writing or debugging existing code

Related reading

Off topic

Legal Advice or Aid

Related reading

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