Personally, I like these sorts of questions. Knowing the official name of something can unlock a huge trove of resources for learning more about it. Yes, sometimes, there doesn't happen to be a good ...
Down votes and close votes do not necessarily mean your question is bad. Every single question yesterday attracted down votes and/or close votes. Some people answer in comments instead of answers ...
I should probably just give up trying to explain this, but code smells as the term originally was coined aren't necessarily bad code. They are probable cause to investigate further. They are a hint ...
-2 is a couple downvotes, which I don't think are public to other users. Could also be something like a suggested edit being accepted then later deleted. Voting fraud can also sometimes cause weird ...
First of all, the people taking these actions don't perceive them as hostile, because they are not intended as hostile. I have no idea how to change that perception. Second, the algorithm that ...
Last year we closed 2728 questions and left 4125 open. 39.8% close rate. This year we closed 4482 questions and left 3417 open. 56.7% close rate.
Lest people see this post and think the expressed opinions are a universal consensus of this site's users, I wanted to provide a dissenting opinion. Software engineering is a challenging field, and ...
Sorry, Doc, too many active voters see this site primarily as a curated list of beautiful questions, rather than primarily a community where people can ask for help. I don't see the voting patterns ...
The de facto standards of this site are both inscrutable and mercurial. You should strive to make the best questions you can, and try to follow any specific non-contradictory advice, but realize much ...
If I may impart one observation I gleaned on my way to 100K+: People who understand a problem well enough to craft a perfectly-worded question rarely need to ask the question. People usually say "...
Another aspect you may not have considered, which I believe is also unique to PSE, is the number of close votes being used on old questions. I have a SEDE query I run occasionally that frequently ...
At some point this site's most active voters stopped focusing on building community and started focusing on policing it, on "training" new users in the quest for the perfect question and the flawless ...
Perhaps I'm missing the joke. The typo doesn't add any humor to the answer itself, but detracts from it. As far as I can tell from the chat transcript, it was desired to be kept solely because the ...
Just for the record, in general I'm in favor of questions asking for help fleshing out people's rough ideas. I don't know the exact context referred to here, but I have been known to point out that ...
Speaking for myself, I cast reopen votes without edits because I have different standards for closing than you do, and believe the question stands on its own merits without needing to be "edited into ...
This is one of those cases where people phrase a question in a way that disguises their true intent. They are not asking for a tutorial on persuasive speaking. They are seeking a deeper ...
Well, 17 people thought the question was topical enough to upvote, 9 felt it was topical enough to answer, and 22 felt it was topical enough to upvote an answer. Then gnat runs his searches 2 years ...
There are two answers to your question: how the site theoretically works, and how it actually works in practice. In theory, the border is that questions should have answers that are supportable by ...
Well, as far as I'm aware, some career questions are still supposed to be on topic, according to this meta answer. I don't know when or how voters decided all career questions are off topic, but I ...
Since he treats everyone that way, and doesn't single out individuals, that somehow makes it no longer harassment, and makes it "conscientiously improving the quality of the site." Unfortunately, ...
Allow me to illustrate with an allegory. At its inception, this site was a crime-ridden city. There was a lot of bad questions, and people didn't stick around very long to invest their time in ...
For what it's worth, I voted to reopen. I don't think questions should be evaluated on the asker knowing if there's a single canonical answer a priori. If most standard libraries you're aware of ...
I voted to reopen. Personally, I don't think this particular question qualifies as a "guessing game" question. From the blog post: Guessing game questions aren't practical. The answer helps you ...
There are a number of cosmetic attributes of questions that make them more likely to be closed: Using the word "you" in your phrasing. Have you ever, what do you think, do you follow this practice, ...
That particular question fit multiple close reasons at once, but people can't select multiple reasons. I personally think it wasn't adequately similar to the dup, but duplicate is the most helpful ...
Chris gave the right answer for this particular circumstance, but I just wanted to point out that promotion of an Area 51 site on an existing site's meta is not unprecedented, and can be acceptable ...
I think this is one of those topics that gets judged by the theoretical questions it might tend to draw, rather than real questions it actually does draw. The tag has a 16% close rate compared to our ...
That argument was made before it got closed. People closed anyway because the "when" argument wasn't convincing. The writing of new code is future work. The fixing of technical debt is future work. ...
Here's how it breaks down: Asking about a tool is on topic on StackOverflow and off topic on Programmers. A lot of people on StackOverflow don't know programmer tool questions are on topic. I've ...
You can use this query. If you're logged in it should autofill the UserId parameter. The text parameter uses SQL syntax. For example, if you want to search for "SQL" anywhere in your comment, enter ...