Can we avoid using the term "Closed" for marginal questions?

Question

When a question is a bad one, possibly irredeemable, it will (hopefully) get closed. This prevents further answers from being added. The question can be edited and re-opened.

However, when hypothetical new user NiceGuy sees their question closed, they often react badly--sometimes with good reason. Yeah, they left me suggestions for editing the question to make it more acceptable, but I put thought and time into the question, and now it's closed? What the hell are those elitist Stack Exchange people thinking? I hate this site!

Seriously, closed is probably a bad word for this state. Can we change this to something else, like frozed or even suspended? People interested in cooking or bicycles or writing see the word "closed" and think, "That's it, this is done. A lost cause."

As a mod on Bicycles, I sometimes see a bad question, one that will attract bad answers unless I close it quickly. So I'll close it, and then the community will complain. I understand their point--let's edit this, not close it--but in the meantime, the bad question will pile up bad answers, wasting everybody's time. (It doesn't help that the first answers on a question will tend to get the most upvotes, regardless of quality.)

Let's say we make this change. I'll use the same case of hypothetical new user NiceGuy again:

NiceGuy posts a question on a site, comes back the next morning and sees the question hasn't gotten any answers yet--because the question is "Frozen/suspended pending additional information". It would be much more encouraging to NiceGuy to see that we think there's a good question in there, that we want to help it be a better question. I want to avoid seeing that big, bold [closed] appended to the title.

I suspect that I'm going to hear that we want to drive these users way, that we want to lose them. The cost of quality is to drive away the forum rats and twitter hounds.

I think that more people can learn to write good questions if we help them in this way.

What do you think? How, exactly, could this be implemented?

Answer 1

We now use "on hold" to initially describe "closed" questions.

There are some nuances to the implementation - the biggest one being that after 5 days of no edits or attempts to reopen the question, it will once again say that it's "closed" - but we took large steps towards softening the phrasing of the closing experience overall and the specific close reasons.

Answer 2

I don't think the answer to user confusion over what X means is likely to be "add Y so the user must understand X and Y".

I've found that commenting when closing help immensely. Try something like:

This question has been closed for $reason. It can be re-opened if it is edited to $standard.

• I prepend "Welcome to $site!" if the user is new/low rep.
• I always link the $reason and/or $standard to appropriate documentation, be it a FAQ entry, SO blog post, or meta post.
• I finish up with a specific editing suggestion or additional explanation if there's room in the comment.

If you want to do things like that more quickly/easily, try the pro forma comments script.

Commenting on close is a lot simpler than creating yet another question disposition that users must understand.

Answer 3

I suspect that I'm going to hear that we want to drive these users way, that we want to lose them. The cost of quality is to drive away the forum rats and twitter hounds.

That's exactly the answer you're going to hear with respect to Stack Overflow. But the situation is potentially very different on the other Stack Exchange sites, particularly the SE 2.0 sites, that aren't absolutely overflowing with users and questions. Jeff has termed this the "big city" problem on Stack Overflow. We can't afford to do too much hand-holding when it comes to bad questions and users who can't/won't follow the guidelines.

Of course, I agree that such hand-holding is more important on the other SE sites, but I would argue that such hand-holding is the job of the moderators (and other dedicated, high-rep community members). Any of the first posts by a new user are listed on the /review page for easy, well, reviewing. Monitoring this page is very important to welcoming new users and leaving constructive feedback on how to improve their questions.

I don't think the problem lies with the word "closed" itself, but rather with the fact that the question is closed without any indication of how the asker can improve it. If the moderator (or community members) who closes the question takes the time to leave a comment explaining what (s)he thought was wrong with the question, some possible suggestions on how to improve it, and a reminder that once the question has been improved or fixed it can be flagged for moderator attention to be immediately re-opened, that's when the new user is going to feel embraced by the community.

Absent that, no one's going to care that their question has been "frozen" rather than "closed". All they're going to see is that they haven't gotten any useful answers, and in fact, "those elitist Stack Exchange people" have prevented their question from ever getting any useful answers.

Most frequently, the apprehension that I see surface over the fact that a question has been "closed" stems from a general lack of awareness or understanding of the ability to re-open closed questions. Particularly the ability of moderators to re-open questions with a single, binding vote. We already have checks and balances built into the system to solve these types of problems. If the question is truly not salvageable and never gets re-opened, then your initial suspicions were right: we probably don't want that question on our network in the first place. It's probably not worth worrying about.

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Beyond all of the above, you've proposed an entirely new feature ("frozen" questions in addition to "closed" questions) which will only increase the complexity of the site(s) and consequently raise the barrier to entry even higher. That seems self-contradictory to me, as the implicit goal here is to make these sites more friendly to new users.

If you're proposing that instead of closing any questions we simply "freeze" them, then I very much disagree. Some questions are actually bad and their presence is actively harmful to the site. Granted, these may be relatively rare, but they do exist, and I think they should be closed immediately, rather than frozen. So obviously we'll need to have both options available.

That raises a few more questions: Is there a separate dialog or UI for community members to vote to "close" or "freeze" a question? How do we make everyone aware of the guidelines for when to use which of these methods? And what are those guidelines in the first place?

And it's not clear at what point a question should go from "frozen" to officially "closed"... Is it after a certain period of time in which the asker fails to improve the question? Is it after a certain number of votes by other members of the community?

Answer 4

My observation is that the word "closed" has connotations that drive user behavior - "closed" feels the same as "killed", even if there are helpful hints to improve the question.

One unforunate byproduct is that questions keep getting repeated. One recent example of many here. This one had a happy outcome, but cluttering the site with duplicate questions even temporarily doesn't help anyone.

Answer 5

The terminology in the use of the word "closed" is not the issue. That's a red herring.

The important bit for smaller SE 2.0 sites is to treat each new user that shows some glimmer of hope with tenderness and understanding. (Bear in mind, some users are obviously not redeemable from the start, and the close reasons should suffice for them.)

For these semi-perhaps-maybe-salvageable users, community moderators should leave a helpful, explanatory comment on the closed questions. A light, personal, welcoming touch will mean a lot more than anything we could possibly automate.

Also, this is certainly far more tenable on SE 2.0 sites of which most get between 2 and 20 questions per day …

https://stackexchange.com/sites?sort=questionsperday&expand=true

… compared to the 150+ on SU, 100+ on SF, and 3,600+ (!) on SO.

Answer 6

Well you want something other than ["closed"] after the question.

You've faced this question before when you implemented voted editing for low-rep users: that the edit is in ["what state?"]

It's a feature/flag that should perhaps be for mods only (users vote-to-close but not vote-to-limbo).

"discuss"! "discussion"! That's the right text: [discussion] or [comments] or [question] (very neutral) or [learn more].