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We'll this recently happened to me, and now I'm out for social justification, so to speak...I'm quite an avid user of StackOverflow, so I do realize that the use of the voting mechanism had been debated ad nauseum, and that it's per users discretion how they wish to apply their god given right to vote.

But I do feel I have a valid point.

I had a question relating to programming principle / guidelines. Which to me at least relates to this forum, it was closed off as too broad and received 2 down votes...

Now my question:

  1. If I cant ask such questions on here, where would the appropriate forum be?

    a . As per the comment of @Yannis Rizos, it seems that there is no place for opinion based / semi-opinion based discussions. Even if an acceptable answer gets chosen. This is quite sad to me at least, as I prefer the StackExchange platform and the community around it. And having to "leave" it to just ask a simple question that's not tech, but tech theory related doesn't seem ideal to me.

  2. Does the fact that its perceived as broad by some, warrant a down vote?

  3. What if the mods/those with the power to close purely have a different opinion on what is perceived as too broad?

    a. Just as an FYI, my question was actually answered satisfactory within context to my question. Thus was it really worth the intervention?

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    Related: Where can I have subjective discussions about programming?
    – yannis
    Apr 28, 2015 at 22:30
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    Why wouldn't a too broad question warrant a close vote as too broad? And many times, too broad questions are poorly researched from the start. ... And a very important caveat - Stack Exchange is not a forum. Yes, that's a thing of naming and terminology - but its an important distinction about how the focus of the site is conveyed.
    – user40980
    Apr 28, 2015 at 22:31
  • @MichaelT, but what if you specifically want the opinions of peers? In hindsight, I could have phrased THIS question's header differently. Haha, to be honest, I don't feel it was too broad, yes there where different opinions on it. But I did isolate what type of examples I was looking for. Again, it wasn't to solve a problem specifically, I was literally looking for peer opinion, or certain types of example (As I was having a discussion with a colleague at the time of asking). (Some peers who have the power believed it was too borad, and that was the end of that)
    – Rohan Büchner
    Apr 28, 2015 at 22:36
  • Can a question with an accepted answer be closed as unanswerable
    – gnat
    Apr 28, 2015 at 22:40
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    @RohanBüchner The problem is the Q&A site doesn't work well for discussions or polls. I go into more detail about that in On discussions and why they don't make good questions. There are other sites that are better suited to opinion polling than Stack Exchange. For your recent question consider the question of your question - "How many ways are there to answer 'What would be a valid situation to not apply the DRY principle / guideline?'?" - and that answer is "a lot". It might be possible to craft it so that is "a few" instead. ...
    – user40980
    Apr 29, 2015 at 0:14
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    The problem is that once the question is answered one way, it becomes difficult to fix five questions to the new focus of the question. That someone answered it well doesn't mean that the question isn't too broad.
    – user40980
    Apr 29, 2015 at 0:15
  • possible duplicate of Why was my question closed or down voted?
    – gnat
    Apr 29, 2015 at 20:45
  • see also: Force members to leave comments when they upvote
    – gnat
    Apr 30, 2015 at 7:06
  • I have to say, they treated a very logical question I had here the same. They did not understand what I was talking about, so downvoted it, without giving any passer-by's a chance to answer. The mods need to adjust their SOP, in my opinion.
    – dyasta
    May 14, 2015 at 22:18

1 Answer 1

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I regularly downvote questions that are too broad so that, when they get closed, I've helped the question gather three downvotes so that I can apply my delete vote right away.

This wouldn't be necessary if people self-deleted their own off-topic questions, but they seldom do, leaving it to the user community to clean up after them.

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