This really is not a "whine". :-) I think SO is a great site and I look forward to contributing to and benefitting from it. That said, I'm trying to get my head around what is and is not acceptable in the domain of "help me with this code" questions. I'm hoping that by asking about a specific case I ran into, I can improve my general understanding of the policy.
The question I'm referring to was asked, answered, voted up, closed and deleted within 72 hours. It's no longer visible to most users, of course, but it's described on Is the title considered part of the question?
As you'll see on that MSO thread, I argued against it being too broad, not objective, belongs on Code Review, etc. On the other hand, I have a better time seeing that it as too limited/narrow (ironically) or that the OP didn't demonstrate that they'd made enough effort to solve on their own. Given the apparently wide range of opinions about what is "acceptable" on SO in terms of programming questions, I figured I'd ask for the actual data in this case.
I'm hoping, in particular, that specific questions about coding style and achieving DRY are not forbidden on SO, but if they are, I'd like that to be made clear, given how common these kinds of questions are. Personally, I see a big difference between someone asking how to eliminate some obvious duplication in a short code fragment and submitting code for a general code review.
Finally, if possible, I'd like to find out why it was deleted as well. That seems even more extraordinary to me relative to the delete criteria than the close was relative to the close criteria.
Update: The question on SO was since undeleted on 2013-Jun-26.