This may be a good question or the weather is nice today

Question

This is a part of one of the reasons for closing questions:

There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format.

Why such artificial ambiguous "or" style of the reason? (there are also other similar examples)

I can't imagine a human explaining something in this way.

We all know how important is to have clear questions and answers, how come this principle of clarity is not respected here? Even worse, I think this sets a very bad example for anyone seeing such message.

Answer 1

Consider the hypothetical help-vampiring question:

Possible answers come to mind:

• Install PHPBB (explain all the setup, options, customization etc.).
• Install vBulletin (explain all the setup and specific options).
• N other answers explaining how to use and setup existing forum frameworks.
• A huge answer summing up all the answers above.
• And finally a huge, 200 pages book-sized answer explaining all the necessary data storage structure, all the models/controllers/views logic, how to treat untrusted data, how to extend the forum with addons, etc. etc.

As you can see, the list of possible answers is unending. You either have an infinite list of small answers or too long (remember, book-sized) answers which don't objectively answer the question, because there is no practical answer to the question.

The "too broad" close reason indicates a question which is outside of the site's scope:

Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.

Having too many answers also open the possibility of a huge answer combining many of the other never-ending answers, so it makes sense to have these descriptions grouped together in the "too broad" close reason.

Even in the cases where these don't overlap, the description is still clear enough:

The "or" joins two potential reasons for too broadness. One or the other or both will apply – Richard Tingle

Having two (nearly) identical close reasons just to provide different descriptions seems rather unnecessary (and confusing for close voters in cases where both apply). I believe the description is clear enough as it currently stands.

Maybe adding a "There is no practical answer to your question" statement to the description could be slightly enlightening as well.

Answer 2

Here is the full text of the close reason:

There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.

So does this say 2 completely different things? Absolutely. But both generally point to the same exact idea, "the scope of your question is to big, you need to focus it more for us to help you".

The purpose of the close reasons is to provide general guidance to the OP on what might be wrong with their question. Specific guidance is usually reserved for the community to provide via comments and even editing.

So why do it this way? There reason is actually for the benefit of the question asker (aka OP).

Imagine a situation where you split up the general ideas into more specific ones, you will end up with possibly dozens of close reasons. Because every person can look at the same exact text and interpret it differently, you will end up with multiple close reasons selected.

• 2 people might select "Too many possible answers"
• 1 might select "Good answers would be too long for this format"
• 1 might select "Please clarify your specific problem"
• 1 might select "Add Additional details to highlight exactly what you need"

So how does this help explain anything? Yes the close reasons are more specific, but now there are 4 different ones selected and none have a majority. They way the system is designed now, only the close reason with the highest vote total will be displayed, so the only feedback the OP will get is "Too many possible answers" and is going to miss out on some of the other bits.

Where as if you combine the close reason how they are now you end up with:

• 3 votes for "Too Broad"
• 2 votes for "Unclear what you are asking"

Yes there is still a conflict, and the close reason on the question is still only going to show the top selected reason, but now you get feedback from the majority of users who selected "Too Broad".

And yes, these conflicts will get even worse when you have 5 different reasons selected as only the first one selected will be displayed.

So this is why we rely on the close reason to only provide general guidance. If you want specific guidance, then usually there is good feedback on what is wrong on the specific question in the comments.