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An earlier bug report of mine was closed as a duplicate, but there's nothing in the iOS app that indicates its closed status. It also ignores the closed status if I go to the answers tab, showing me the button to add a new answer.

I shouldn't be prompted to answer a closed question*, and there should be an indication the question is closed, preferably with a link to the duplicate in this case.

*or able to, but that's the API's fault**
**for completeness, the API allowing this is intentional, per the rules the site plays by.

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  • Can you give us a link or title?
    – Ben Collins
    Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 15:24
  • @BenCollins Well, I had linked to this closed bug report of mine as an example of where I noticed the problem, but it was edited out for unknown reasons.
    – Tim Stone
    Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 15:30
  • I put it back. I couldn't quite figure that one out either.
    – Ben Collins
    Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 15:34

1 Answer 1

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It seems that we have let closed questions through in places, and you're not really supposed to see closed questions in the app at this stage. The right answer for the time being is that we should be excluding them from the questions list and search results (and the feed, although I think they already are excluded there).

This will be fixed in the next build. This will be fixed soon, but not tonight, probably. This is tricker than it sounds because we have to do the filtering on the client side - the API doesn't expose a way to filter out closed questions. "Well, that sounds easy!" you say, and you're right. What's not as easy is always being sure how many questions you have available to display when the user is scrolling through the questions list.

Edit: just to be clear, implementing all the features it takes to handle closed posts is on the roadmap. It's just not going to come as the fix to this bug report.

Update: the next update should exclude closed questions from the questions list. While we do plan to have more complete support for closed questions in the near-ish future, I consider this to be the fix for this bug. I've now marked it .

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  • Makes sense. As a side note, I think I got to it by tapping the comment notification in my inbox, in case you didn't consider that view.
    – Tim Stone
    Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 15:48
  • mmmmmm....that's a good one. Gonna have to mull that over a bit.
    – Ben Collins
    Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 18:47
  • But why not show closed questions? What is the show stopper?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 21:10
  • @ShadowWizard the problem is that we need to build features to handle it - like Tim mentioned in the OP: we shouldn't prompt users to answer a closed question. There are also closed states that should prevent commenting, editing, etc. The app just doesn't know about all that... yet.
    – Ben Collins
    Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 21:12
  • Fair enough, think I got a bit better understanding of what's going on behind the scenes. Thanks! :)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 22:03
  • "the API doesn't expose a way to filter out closed questions" - Just abuse /search/advanced's closed option until the API gets angry and Kevin is forced to fix the problem! ;)
    – Tim Stone
    Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 23:49
  • Also of note is the fact that in the default view for a given site, heavily down voted questions aren't filtered out like they would be on the site. This seems like it might cause similar complications, if the expected behaviour would be to hide them.
    – Tim Stone
    Commented Feb 12, 2014 at 1:02

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