New 10K tool: question close statistics

Question

Two years ago, we rolled out some significant changes to closing, along with a massive number of changes behind the scenes to clean up the supporting logic that had grown crufty over the years. As with many ambitious projects, this one quickly pushed the limits of its 6–8 week implementation schedule and we didn’t get around to doing everything we’d hoped to do.

Most critically, we never exposed any data on how the new close reasons were being used. Since every site can create and use a limited number of customized off-topic reasons whenever they wish, this was an unfortunate omission: without knowing how (or IF) close reasons are being used, it becomes very difficult to tell if they’re even useful, or to observe when they’ve outlived their usefulness...

Comprehensive close reason usage statistics

The page /tools/question-close-stats is now live for 10K users on every site!

This page contains four categories:

1. Current and past off topic close reasons A detailed history of all off-topic reasons used on the site.
2. Closed and Asked questions Raw numbers on how many questions are being asked and how many are being closed.
3. Closure statistics A detailed breakdown of the reasons for which questions are being closed, along with what happens to them afterwards.
4. Custom closed as off-topic questions The most common voter-entered reasons for closing questions as off-topic (these correspond to the comments left under questions when the voter chooses Close → Off Topic → Other).

This page is visible to anyone with the moderator tools privilege, with the goal of allowing these most experienced users to identify potential problems and make informed decisions regarding closing and available close reasons. The nature of the data included in this report is based on ad-hoc queries I’ve been using for some time now to help guide these discussions on meta – I hope it proves as useful to you as it has to me.

Big thanks to Oded for implementing this! Please post feedback (in the form of answers) below.

Answer 1

Oded: status-completed - "Apologies for this. I was using some CSS rules that only existed in the newer CSS. I've made the changes to ensure all sites now use these."

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Formatting appears to be off for sites with older CSS, such as Programmers, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Security, Wordpress, GIS and Cooking.

_{click for larger image}

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And who said Programmer's is harsh about closing questions?! There's nothing wrong with a 119% close rate, is there?

_{For the curious, there is an active clean-up of old, off-topic questions underway on Programmers. Those closures are skewing the numbers.}

Answer 2

I am aware that this is not necessarily the purpose of this and may not justify the effort, but would it be possible to get a list of questions closed with a specific close reason, in particular the custom ones?

I am asking because the list of custom close reasons on German Language SE revealed some questionable close reasons, for which I would like to see the respective question (e.g., to educate the closer):

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is spam.
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because I am nuts.

I can imagine that this is also helpful for other purposes.

Answer 3

It's not quite obvious what the green background represents (screenshot from Math):

It appears to be: "currently active reasons, except those built-in". I'd expect the colors to differentiate between all active and inactive reasons.

Also, the dark background makes text somewhat less readable; I think it would be better to instead apply light grey background to the inactive reasons (or have the font greyed out). Since the stats don't go back more than 30 days, there isn't much to do with inactive reasons.

Answer 4

I really like the new page, but will there be longer date ranges available? 30 days is useful, but not as useful as if I could easily compare that to longer periods.

I know I could query this from the Data Explorer, but since it's on a shiny new page, why not add six months or a year at the least?

Answer 5

On German Language SE, there is a close reason that has been approved and never deactivated. However, it is not available as a close reason and has never been, as far as I can remember.

Either there is something wrong with the data or I am misinterpreting it. Either way, it’s confusing.

Here is the overview:

And here is the current selection of off-topic reasons:

Answer 6

Oded: status-completed - "I should have thought of that from the start."

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Sweet!

Could you put a little background color on alternating rows of the tables, especially the middle one with the actual stats? (Or vertically center elements in their cells?)

The size of the close reasons (in the first column) causes the data in the other columns to be hard to visually associate with the correct row, and I feel like an idiot holding a ruler up to my screen.

Answer 7

The tab navigation is the same for both the stats tool and the close statistics tool. Perhaps there should be a new tab?

https://stackoverflow.com/tools/question-close-stats

https://stackoverflow.com/tools?tab=stats

Answer 8

Simple ask: it'd be nice if we could sort the close vote data. It's an interesting statistic on Stack Overflow to see which question closure is reopened most often for a given period of time.

More complicated ask: could we have some pie charts of the close vote percentage data? Seeing things visually at a quick glance would be helpful, too.

Answer 9

status-completed

As mentioned in other answers, the sites that haven't had their CSS updated have a borked version of this page. However, grabbing the couple dozen CSS rules that apply to the elements on that page and throwing them into a Stylish style seems to work fine. Could the old CSS be patched with these rules to fix this tool on these sites?

Answer 10

I like the page, but as others have suggested, making the close reasons links to searches for the questions closed with those reasons would be nice.

Also, I find the table of stats difficult to read without lines delineating the rows and columns.

Answer 11

status-completed

On Scifi, the contents are there but the table is not formatted:

Answer 12

It was explicitly mentioned as a comment above, but being able to see links to these custom close reasons would be nice to have. I'm not entirely sure how we'd want to handle it in the case of more-than-one question; perhaps a (new style) search page with all of the questions listed in it?

Answer 13

Would it be possible to provide a statistics of the tags of closed questions (preferrably the tags intially used by the authors)? This way, a community could identify problem tags and improve their tag wiki or suggest to equip them with a tag alert to help askers ask better question or see that a question is not fit for a site before asking.

Answer 14

Please collapse the wall of text that is the first column close reasons verbiage.

If you could show a compact table with the data first and left. We can hover or click if we need to see the entire reason of the close. If you really like the full text - perhaps hang it off the right side or let it continue off the screen to the right.

If this isn't workable, perhaps having a short abbreviation for each close reason or some other short/unique key with a legend table below.