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https://stackoverflow.com/q/15614984/99456

The actual question didn't start off great but with a little help the question was rephrased and the problem was solved.

I don't really care whether this specific question is reopened or not. But are we to (vote to) close every question that is only relevant to that specific problem? Maybe it should have been closed as too localized?


Well, it doesn't matter now. The question has been deleted.

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    You're correct; it's too localized. It does it matter what it was closed as? Mar 25, 2013 at 16:58
  • The exact close reason is determined by the majority of votes, so it's possible it got 3 votes to close prior to you editing it, and 2 votes for other reasons afterwards
    – Rachel
    Mar 25, 2013 at 16:58
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    @benisuǝqbackwards I think it does matter. Otherwise whats the point in having close reasons? Mar 25, 2013 at 17:00
  • @KevinBrydon well close reasons do help people to evaluate whether or not they should vote to close Mar 25, 2013 at 17:07
  • @SamIam I think you may have misread. I'm not advocating getting rid of close reasons. I'm merely saying that the close reason should be correct. Mar 25, 2013 at 17:09
  • @KevinBrydon I think you might have misunderstood me. I merely provided a purpose for having close reasons that did not depend on the specific close reason being correct. Mar 25, 2013 at 17:13
  • @KevinBrydon: It's a majority opinion. Mar 25, 2013 at 18:59

2 Answers 2

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Since I was the first to vote to close I'll give my thoughts:

This was the original https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/15614984/1.

No code, no specific question, just a plea for some hand-holding for a question that's asked several times a day and has infinite number of resources from both Google and StackOverflow.

I could have gone with a Duplicate, Not Real Question, or Too Localized for the reason. If you review the other questions from OP it's clear he uses SO as a lint-checker or personal debugger. Good place to start if you want to use up all your close votes.


As an aside,

The actual question didn't start off great but with a little help the question was rephrased and the problem was solved.

I don't understand why this is important but I keep seeing it as a reason for keeping questions. Achieving a solution and/or helping OP has no bearing on its appropriateness for this site. It might seem counter-intuitive but helping the original author should be the furthest thing from your mind when judging appropriateness. Instead, you should ask yourself if your question is formatted in a way that it WILL help others in the future. If you satisfy this need then your question is almost certainly welcome here. In fact, this is why I discourage other users from answering such questions because it encourages more. Don't encourage bad/unwelcomed questions by helping them.

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I can't speak for the people who voted to close, but here's my take on it:

The question posted was of the form "why doesn't this work".

The process for answering such a question consists of reading code and seeing if any errors jump out at us.

Most people on SO don't like to do this. Normally we like the OP to provide more specific information.

To be fair, normally the OP can provide more specific information than could have been provided in this instance, such as stack traces and error messages, but the question still had the appearance of an incomplete question. So what likely happened, is people saw things that the question had in common with the typical incomplete question, and voted to close based upon that pattern recognition.

Rather than just saying that the data isn't being inserted, maybe the OP could have posted the results of some query that demonstrate that it's not being inserted.


The answer to the question ended up being a simple typo fix, which makes this question closeable as too localized.

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    Just for the record, I didn't ask the question :) Mar 25, 2013 at 17:04

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