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The "What Can I Ask About?" Help Page is out of date:

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It has the old close reasons (recently removed) and does not include the new close reason:

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    Interesting. I'm surprised these wouldn't just get updated automatically. Are moderators really supposed to edit this page every time they change a custom off-topic close reason?
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Jan 12, 2014 at 0:52

2 Answers 2

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I don't think we should change this page. Not yet, anyway.

Despite the removal of two of the close reasons mentioned on the Help/On-Topic page, the ideas that the removed close reasons embodied are still good advice, in my opinion. Questions regarding problems with your code should be accompanied by a description of the problem, and code that reproduces it. Questions asking for code should demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved.

When I edited the Help/On-Topic page, I did so due to complaints about the way the words "off-topic" are used in the close dialog. That page now makes it very clear what "Off-Topic" refers to: questions which are unsuitable for Stack Overflow, for a variety of reasons. That those reasons happened to map to the custom close reasons that existed at the time was a happy coincidence.

But it's just a coincidence. There's no rule that says this page has to map directly to the custom close reasons, and to my knowledge, no other Stack Exchange On-Topic page does. Stack Overflow is a bit of an odd-duck in that regard; big city problems call for big city solutions.

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  • Maybe we should add that close reason to the help dialog, and not remove the old ones? (I'd like the old ones to be reinstated as close reasons, too, but that's not going to happen).
    – John Dvorak
    Commented Jan 12, 2014 at 6:03
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    I considered that, but the new close reason is different from the others. People don't need to know this close reason in advance, and I've never seen anyone complain that their question was closed because their problem was solved in a way unrelated to their question, or due to a simple typographical error. They're just happy their problem got solved.
    – user102937
    Commented Jan 12, 2014 at 6:07
  • It is a bit confusing the the wording is perfectly matched, but what you say makes sense.
    – JDB
    Commented Jan 12, 2014 at 16:04
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Yuck. I'm sorry but there is a large number of questions to which the proper reply is something like, "What have you tried?" And we had a beautiful close reason saying exactly that, really well. Now you apparently want me to really badly type out some hastily written probably angry explanation that questions that don't show effort aren't on topic. Bluntly, my participation reviewing basic questions on this site just dropped. A lot.

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    Not sure what you're saying here. "What have you tried" was abused so badly that it's now a banned phrase in comments.
    – user102937
    Commented Jan 12, 2014 at 7:01
  • @RobertHarvey right, but we've since written a beautiful close reason, "Questions must demonstrate a minimal understanding...", that says WHYT in good detail. So I've used that reason a lot. Part of the problem with WHYT is it added zero value on top of a downvote, so if that's all you're going to comment, just DV and move on. The close reasons just removed relented that boilerplate is useful and may as well be well-written. Now that's gone so I have to write my own boilerplate each time I want to close questions these apply to.
    – djechlin
    Commented Jan 12, 2014 at 17:17
  • So questions asking for code w/o attempt are can no longer be flagged as off-topic?
    – OldProgrammer
    Commented Jan 13, 2014 at 3:24

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