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. They 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. 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?

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?