How do I get the list of questions that are currently "on hold"?

Question

Please do not mark and close this question as a duplicate of "Query closed questions" as the proposed duplicate does not answer the question of how to get the questions labeled [on hold] (rather than [closed]) -- as per comment posted by NormalHuman.

I would like to get all the questions that are currently put "on hold". These questions are labeled with [on hold] at the end of the post title (Please see a NOTE at the bottom).

So far I have tried the following search keywords:

• on hold: too general and displays over 1500+ results
• "on hold": displays over 780+ results
• [on-hold]: displays 95 results. I was really hoping this tag would give me the expected result but it did not. It was showing all the posts that were suggested with "on-hold" tag while submission.

Here are few example questions that have [on hold] at the end of the post title (Please see a NOTE at the bottom): (Note: After 5 days these will be labeled with "[closed]")

1. careers tools are too limited to search for candidates [on hold]

2. Why are Stack Overflow people nice? [on hold]

3. How to avoid infinite activity crash on Android? [on hold]

How should I get the questions just like the above ones i.e. labeled with [on hold] in their title not mixed with anything else?

NOTE: The question title is usually the actual page title (<title>....</title>) for most of the posts BUT in case of "on hold" (and may be "closed", "duplicate") it's not true. So, its "actual page title" vs "post title". I learned something new here. Thanks to Patrick Hofman(see comment below) for this find.

Answer 1

There are 3 possible ways to get that information, some are less precise than the other but each of them can be useful depending on your specific requirement or use case.

Search

The search capabilites of the Stack Exchange sites don't have the possiblity to search for ALL on-hold questions because the status on-hold is not differentiated from closed in the search engine.

If you are interested in the recent/new questions that are on hold you could use the search query:

closed:yes created:5d.. duplicate:no migrated:no

but that only works for questions asked in the last 5 days.

Stack API

To get the results you are after you need to leverage the Stack API which I have used in the included and runnable code snippet:

(function () {
  var api = {
    url: 'https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/',
    endpoint: 'search/advanced',
    params: { 
      site: 'stackoverflow',
      pagesize: 100,
      order: 'desc',
      sort: 'activity',
      closed: 'True',
      migrated: 'False',
      Filter: '!Pw)kIARMuFW9bQ0Mxv)LqDCFAFq9fY'
      }
    };
    
    
  function createUrl(ap) {
    var ep = ap.url + ap.endpoint +'?',
     nv = [];
    $.each(ap.params, function (k,v) {
       nv.push(k + '=' + v);
    });
    console.log(ep + nv.join('&'));
    return ep + nv.join('&');
  }
 
  function enableLoad(func) {
    $('#load').show();
    $('#load').one('click', func);
  }
   
  function load(page) {
    console.log(page);
    api.params.page = page;
    $('#load').hide();
    $.get(createUrl(api), function (data) {
      var i, 
          list = $('#onhold'),
          next;
      for(i = 0; i < data.items.length; i = i +1) {
        if (typeof data.items[i].closed_details !== 'undefined' &&
            data.items[i].closed_details.on_hold) {
          list.append(
            $('<div></div>').append(
            $('<a></a>')
              .attr('href', data.items[i].link)
              .html(data.items[i].title)
            ));
        }
      }
      if (data.has_more) {
        next = function () { load(page + 1); };
        if (data.backoff !== undefined) {
          window.setTimeout( function () {
              enableLoad(next);
            }, 
            data.items.backoff * 1000);  
        } else {
            enableLoad(next);
        }
      } else {
        $('#load').hide(); 
      }
    });
  }
  
  load(1);
}());

#onhold div {
  overflow:hidden;
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
  white-space:nowrap;
  }

#load {
  padding: 1em;
  text-align: center; 
  cursor: pointer
  }

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div id="error" style="display:none">
</div>
<div id="onhold">
  
</div>
<div id="load" style="display:none">
 Click to load more ...
</div>

This works by using the search/advanced endpoint, iterating over the results and check if in the subtype closed_details the field on_hold is true.

In that case I add a link to the question in the result. As the results are paged you have to click load more to load the next batch.

The Stack Exchange Data Explorer

One other option that could work once a week is to query SEDE just after the refresh (normally on Monday morning around 3:00 UTC). The following query could help with that:

declare @lastupdate datetime
select @lastupdate =  create_date 
from sys.databases
where database_id = db_id()

select [postid] as [Post Link]
from posthistory
where creationdate > dateadd(d, -5, @lastupdate)
and posthistorytypeid = 10 -- close

At posting this query returned 3,586 rows for Stack Overflow.