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What should we do with old, very popular closed questions?
I refer to moderators closing posts based on a strict interpretation of policy, regardless of their value to the community. It is somewhat duplicative of Are moderators closing good questions as "Not constructive", but argued a lot differently.
Consider, for instance, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1332574/common-programming-mistakes-for-scala-developers-to-avoid. This has 11K views, 122 up-votes, 3 down-votes, and 130 favorites. AFAICT, there were no close votes - it was just closed by the moderator. Despite being closed a while ago, it continues to be at the top of the [scala] FAQ list. As a Scala newbie, it immediately attracted my attention, and is well worth reading and re-reading.
The "not constructive" tag says:
We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.
This post was up for two years before closing. Answers are entirely based on facts, references, and specific expertise. While of course the notion of what's a "common" mistake is open to opinion, in general, the answers have little opinion, and have not caused significant debate, arguments, or extended discussion. They do constitute an ad hoc poll, but in my opinion that's a good thing; the truly common mistakes rise to the top over time as people vote.
While in general the directive to avoid open-ended questions is good, it should be considered a means to an end, not a cast-in-stone rule. The end is to have useful posts with solid answers that attract a lot of eyeballs - isn't it? If so, this post certainly qualifies.
As this post is closed for a longer and longer time, the answers will become stale. Scala is still evolving.
I've seen this kind of closing by other moderators on other posts as well, so I'm commenting here to raise a more general flag.
I'd prefer answers that provide some reasoning - not just a general reference to the FAQ.
I suspect some answers may deal with:
AFAICT, there's no way to reopen a moderator-closed post by vote. You can just nominate it to be reopened.
The "reopen" button should provide a way to provide rationale. Moderators can't mind-read, AFAIK ;-)
Another possible disposition, which I disagree with, is to move this kind of post over to programmers.stackexchange.com.
This post was up for two years before closing
-- I don't think the "Not Constructive" close reason has been around for that long. – user102937 Feb 16 '12 at 19:12