New Site Name and Scope: how to handle blatant debugging questions?

Question

Per my reading of July 22nd discussion primary focus of the coming changes is to prevent the flood of debugging questions. Both SE Community Manager and our moderators appear to be in agreement about that:

- There are a crazy number of things that should be closed or downvoted or edited or just discouraged, but only a tiny handful reach the sort of volume that you need to announce them to all visitors.

- And the code troubleshooting types are, by far, the worst.

- I'm pretty sure just about every site on the network gets coding questions now and then, but only a few bother mentioning that they're off-topic explicitly anywhere. here, they're a problem, so you focus on that

Explicit mentioning of "not code troubleshooting" in the suggested site tagline also appears to support this vision.

Given above I wonder if we need to somehow change the way how blatant debugging questions are handled, maybe have more active involvement of diamond moderators or maybe ask for system features ^{1, 2, 3} or something else?

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My understanding of the current approach is, it assumes primarily involvement of regular community members which leads to cumbersome and lengthy process.

• ^{First, a question needs to collect five close votes from 3K users. Per my observations this tends to take few hours or even days. After closure, question hangs on the site for 9 days before it gets auto-deleted. If it manages to get an upvoted or accepted answer prior to closure things get even more complicated because such questions aren't eligible for automatic deletion and can in theory hang in here indefinitely.}

Given that planned changes are so much focused on preventing debugging questions our current way looks somewhat worrying.

I hope that the changes will help to educate newcomers against asking for code troubleshooting over here. But statistics seems to suggest that ~20% questions here come from users who simply don't have an option to ask for debugging help at more appropriate site.

This makes me wonder how to handle it when such questions are posted here despite all the effort and guidance.

Answer 1

This was discussed quite thoroughly in the comments. For readers not inclined to dive into details below are key takeaways:

Currently there seem to be no need to do anything because it is expected that coming changes (particularly tagline) will suffice to prevent enough of debugging questions (including those from users blocked at SO) to let the rest to be handled efficiently.

This may be reconsidered later if (if) it turns that even after changes we still get too many questions asking for debugging help.

As for diamond moderators more actively deleting debugging questions, this is possibly not even related to site rename because SE Community Manager already recommended them doing this.

^{- will the diamond moderators take a more active role in sweeping up the code troubleshooting questions...}

^{- Personally, I have been. Ever since Shog strongly suggested faster deletions in The Whiteboard. Previously, I was hesitant to delete questions that would otherwise be Roomba'd, but I am now. I guess I don't see that as a change that is related to the rebranding at all.}