Question closed because yes/no answer

Question

I hope this is the right place to ask this question.

I opened a question SO and it was almost immediately closed by a moderator with the reason

Closed this as the only two possible answers are "yes it is" or "no it isn't".

I'm a long time SO user and I didn't remember this rule, so I searched here:

• Closing 'easy' questions - yes or no?
• Should I flag answers consisting only of "No" or "Yes"?

But in none of these threads was I able to find a rule that explains the reason why the question was closed.

Can you help me to understand?

What I can't understand, is that if I had opened the question with no context, then people would probably have asked me "what have you tried"? I added my context, and the question was closed because it's only a yes/no.

Moreover, this statement is not correct. In fact, an answer to a yes/no question can contain several additional details, as you can see from the comments. People are suggesting improvements and alternatives.

Answer 1

When asking a yes/no question there are one of two possibilities:

1. You really want a yes/no answer. If this is the case, and you don't need anything else to answer your question then it means the answers will be inherently low quality. An answer that only says "Yes" or "No" (in addition to not meeting the minimum length) would be of very low quality. SO answers expect more.

2. You don't actually want a yes/no answer, in which case your real question is not actually a yes/no question, and you're hoping that people will determine what your real question is. For example, someone might ask, "Can I do [...]?" when what they really meant to ask was, "How can I do [...]?"

Almost all yes/no questions I've seen fall into case 2; they should be edited into a question that isn't really asking for just a yes/no, it should be asking to explain something. (Even if it has a yes/no in there somewhere.) Note that just adding "Explain" at the end isn't really a good way to go about this; you should refactor the question on a more fundamental level.

To cover your specific case of a question in the form of "Is this correct" you can refactor it to something like, "Under what circumstances, if any, will the following code not [...]".

So while some of these yes/no questions can be of low enough quality that I can understand closing them, almost all (including yours) are capable of being edited into a question that isn't a yes/no question, and that is encouraging high quality answers, as such questions of this form should have a higher rate of reopening (after some simple editing) than many other types of closed questions.

Answer 2

Well, it's not just because of it being a yes/no question, but because of the way the question is asked.

If the answer to your question is "yes" then there was never a problem and thus never a real question in there anywhere. It then becomes more of a Code Review problem as people try to explain things you could have done better, which is off-topic for Stack Overflow.

If the answer to your question is "no", well, all I can say is you should already know if it's working or not. You wrote a query, why didn't you just try running it? Then you could explain the problem you're having and ask for help on why it doesn't work. If you did run it, you could easily rephrase the question to reflect that and make it much more acceptable.

Answer 3

Stack Overflow is not just a 'get an answer for me' place, it's "Produce quality content that is useful for people who follow". In the case of your question, the second part is lacking, and the first part isn't really helpful to anyone else.

Here's what I mean:

I need to select (and eventually delete) all records from tableA (foo) where there are no associated records in tableB (bar). The association is a one-to-many association.

You start out really well. You explain the problem.

But then, you ask a question that isn't useful to anyone else:

Is the following SQL query correct?

Let's say the answer is Yes, what happens?

You have an answer that says

Yes (insert text to meet 15 character limit).

Imagine what a person who searches for your problem will see? They're hoping for information, and all they have to go on is an answer that isn't helpful.

You could argue that's a function of a bad answer; but I argue that bad answers come from bad questions. Good questions could have bad answers, but they're not explicitly asking for them. What all bad questions have in common is that they're not asking for something that has the potential to be useful for others.

To improve your question, you ought to try something. You know when you run this query whether or not it's correct, and if you can't run it on a data set, you should download AdventureWorks and use that (or your DBMS's equivalent).

It's not too much for us to ask you to put effort into your question, and figuring out whether or not your query is correct (and showing us the output if it's not correct) falls squarely on your shoulders.

Answer 4

Actually, yeah. This was a great question from a research effort stance, but it left the answerers with very little to work with. Just... "uhhh yep, looks good? What were you worried about?" Would be very helpful if you answered one of these questions:

• "I ran it and it worked, but here's why I'm concerned I didn't do it right."
• "I couldn't run it for this reason."
• "I ran it and it didn't work right, here's the problem I had."

So take this as a "light closure, as in, not quite answerable, improve it a little and it can be reopened. I do sympathize that it's somewhat problematic it got closed before you had any chance to improve it, but alas, that is our current workflow - and if you do make this improvement it can be easily reopened. Please don't take this too personally, we need members like you who are willing to put up with a certain amount of B.S. so we can, for instance, improve our close-workflow.

Answer 5

Personally I think the choice of close reason was probably not the best. At a minimum the wording could have been trivially changed to:

Is the following SQL query the best possible way to get this result?

...to bypass the original close reason. That, to me, is a valid question.

However, this is most definitely a duplicate question and could have been closed as such - but that is harder since there's often substantial effort in finding the "best" dupe to point to.

I think in this instance the closure was a little heavy handed, especially given that it was a unilateral closure by a developer (not an elected community moderator) and it happened 2 minutes after posting.

That being said, it's not that hard to get a question reopened - remember that "closed" questions are really more "on hold" until they can be improved.