Flagging face-palm or D'Oh posts

Question

For some over the last few weeks I've commented on/answered several posts where the OP immediately replied "Oops, I just found my problem and it was a simple typo (or something similar)". In fact this seems to be happening with increasing frequency.

These posts serve no useful purpose and the OP should delete them, but this often doesn't happen even with gentle hints as comments.

Does anybody think there's a need for an "OP Retracted" moderator flag available to high-rep (say, 10K+) users? Maybe I've been unlucky but I seem to be wishing for this more and more often.

EDIT: The problem is not just syntax errors. I'd characterize it as more of the OP posting the question before really thinking about it and realizing they know the answer a minute after committing the post. I.e. "post first, think later, d'oh!".

Answer 1

It's not terribly uncommon for someone to basically answer their own question just by writing it, and then it's just a matter of them actually realizing that they've done so prior to posting the question. Common d'oh moments would include:

• "Why was I trying to cast a string as a float in the first place?"
• "It would have helped if I had permissions to ACTUALLY WRITE TO THE %@^%#^@ FILE!"
• "I forgot how to math (after asserting that 3 == 4)"

... and so on. Note, these aren't questions where it's obvious that a user had a fundamental misunderstanding of types, syntax or other concepts - it really was a Homer Simpsonesque ^™ moment that is extremely unlikely to repeat and provide no real use to anyone in the future.

Questions that boil down to missing a semicolon (or something else) can be useful if someone uses a compiler or parser error to search in an attempt to figure out what exactly the error is trying to tell them. Even the examples I gave above might be useful to someone learning a language by a basic understanding of the structure coupled with trial and error, even the bogus assertion. Some versions of GCC thought that negative ten was indistinguishable from 10.

I found these types of questions to be particularly useful when I was learning Javascript - I didn't know what certain errors even meant, much less what I should be looking for to fix my code, so use me - an ape that learned how to read and later developed an interest in Javascript as your target audience. If that question couldn't possibly help me fix my LISP and it really is a case where the entire premise of the question never really existed in the first place, then you can do as jmort suggests and use a custom close reason. Try, however, to tailor the reason to be specific to the question, not just for the benefit of the question author but also anyone that finds it through a related search.

If that's not the case, then consider, well, answering the question with something that would be immensely helpful to literate apes.

Answer 2

I would suggest voting to close these posts as off-topic, with a comment letting the user know that the problem was caused by a syntax error and will not be helpful to future visitors.

Danny Beckett is right, "too localized" did indeed cover these cases, but too many people misunderstand that "too localized" doesn't have anything to do with location. However, that doesn't make these syntax error questions on-topic or useful.

It may even be a good idea to try and add another custom off-topic close reason specifically for syntax errors, as I can't really see a case where those types of questions would be useful, and this particular close reason would be less likely to be misunderstood as having to do with a place.

As for cases where someone posted a question and then had that moment of realization that the answer is fully within their grasp, we must step back and take a look at the question on its own merits. Is the question well-written? Does the question clearly describe the problem and include information that would help others with the same problem relate to it? If there are answers, are they high quality? In short, would a person with the same or similar problem benefit from the material if he or she found the site from a Google search?

If the question is valuable, it shouldn't be closed. The point of Stack Overflow is not just to help the asker but to also help the thousands of future visitors out there who have the same or a similar problem.

With that said, the asker may benefit from what Jeff Atwood calls Rubber Duck Problem Solving. Sometimes, the act of actually writing out your question, with all of the details, what you've tried, what errors you're getting, and any other relevant information, oftentimes helps a person find the answer to the problem.

Arguably, as long as a question is good for Stack Overflow, this isn't a bad way to work through your problems, assuming one writes very good questions that "give back" to the community and that, if there are no answers, the asker returns to post a nice, well-written, detailed self-answer.