An official way of closing announcements on Meta?

Question

Currently, many announcements are closed using reasons such as

• off-topic (custom reason)

  • The second draft of our Code of Conduct is available for feedback and review

• off-topic (can no longer be reproduced)

  • Warlords of Documentation: Your Quest(ions Answered)
  • New Navigation Release Candidate
  • New navigation, alpha 2 released

• too localized

  • Will Stack Overflow boycott GoDaddy because of their support for SOPA?

• off-topic (pertains only to a specific site)

  • 2014 SO Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

• duplicate

  • Profile Page Makeover, Part 2: the Prototype
  • We'd like your feedback on our new Code of Conduct!

As these questions are often closed as off-topic, they show the canned close message that it can be edited to make it on-topic.

If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.

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While I understand most of these questions are closed in order to prevent more responses and this haphazard method does indeed achieve the intended, I feel that this way of closing moderator questions is rather disorganized and unmethodical. They are quite misleading to new users since such announcements are not really off-topic at the time of post.

As Stack Overflow is an established site, I believe a more official and formal method should be implemented for closing moderator announcements.

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Thus, I propose the following methods:

1. A more elaborate solution – create a moderator-only announcement-closed tag. Questions with this tag will show a special message underneath.

   This is an announcement from the Stack Overflow team. We are not accepting new answers as the issue at hand has been resolved. Thanks for reading!

   Furthermore, questions with this tag will automatically be closed but cannot be flagged or deleted. Only moderators can reopen it.

   ^{I believe this proposal is achievable since it is similar to a previous official Stack Overflow proposal – We're Implementing an "announcement" Tag for Direct Communication From the Team.}

2. An easier solution – simply designate an off-topic close reason for moderators to use.

   This is an announcement from the Stack Overflow team. We are not accepting new answers as the issue at hand has been resolved. Thanks for reading!

Answer 1

What we essentially need is a blog archetype for MSE. I talked about this before because it's something we've been thinking about for a while, but the timing couldn't have been worse.

The 'gist' of it:

• Lower barrier to entry for most features (voting / commenting) if the tag is applied.
• Questions would be blog posts, the only 'close' reasons would be to point at a subsequent follow-up post (like the CoC chain of announcements), or 'archive mode' for older discussions that just don't need answers anymore.
• You couldn't mark questions as a duplicate of a 'blog post'. In fact we'd probably have a feature to open a discussion automatically linking to the parent 'blog' post
• Answers would essentially become very glorified comments.
• Voting on 'blog' posts and 'comments' wouldn't earn / cost you rep.
• We'd probably want to have a polling mechanism that's still quick-n-dirty, but better than aggregate upvote counts on answers. Might call this something like 'contest mode' or similar.

Anyway, I'm thinking off the top of my head here, but we really do need to bring back the more frequent posts that are mostly just a stream of consciousness about what we're doing, prioritizing, learning, etc. The main blog is great for dissertation and content more applicable to a wider industry audience, and that makes stuff that speaks mostly to insiders look a bit out of place. Besides, our platform works better if you think about individual components (editing, revisions, notifications, voting, moderation, etc).

I don't have a timetable on this other than I really want to get it underway to the point that we have a functional wireframe implementation with the adjusted thresholds, closing tweaks, etc (just the bare minimum) around the time we do Winter festivities. But I can't be sure we'll hit that, because that schedule has a lot of competition.

I'd hate to bolt something on that isn't designed to be a piece of that puzzle, because honestly, that's what we really need.

I'm going to give this a status-review for now, because it essentially describes one moving part of a larger thing.

Answer 2

This is yet another argument for the Obsolete close reason.

Should it be possible to flag questions to be closed as obsolete?

We really want this reason on Travel (my answer to a Meta question about it), and it would also take care of this issue.