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It's really annoying to have spent a significant amount of time pulling together a good answer to what I thought was a legitimate question, and then see that it's closed and I can't submit it or that it's migrated and I have to answer over there without the site-specific tools that I was going to use. Prompted by this question and my trouble to answer it: https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/q/24309/10721

Could there be a mechanism to delay or prevent actions that block answers until there are no answers in progress? It should probably include a notification to the answerer and a deadman button to prevent an answer from being started for the sole purpose of holding the question open.

Thoughts?

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3 Answers 3

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Your pain actually serves a purpose. When people ask on the wrong site, but get an answer anyway, they are rewarded for ignoring the rules, including not bothering to learn the rules on first arrival. Therefore the site is better served by such questions not getting answers before they are closed.

Once you lose some work by having a question closed while you were typing an answer, that pain will mean that next time, if you see something that obviously deserves to be closed, you won't start to answer it. This is a feature. You are avoiding pain for yourself, but you are also being steered away from rewarding the wrong behaviours. All to the good.

So my advice to you is to examine questions a little more closely before you answer them. Sure, there will be some mis-closings and you will still get caught by surprise on occasion, but you should be able to reduce it to the point where it no longer is much of an issue for you.

And what about the case where you did examine the question, and it should not have been closed? The solution to that is to re-open it. Being able to squeak an answer onto it before the wrongful closing is not an appropriate workaround for the presence of wrongful closings. Solve that problem rather than trying to mitigate the effects of that problem.

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  • Okay, so take my solution of a warning and deadman button, and add to it a clear way to challenge the closing or migration before it times out. (which can be extended with the deadman button, which itself will become old and tiring after a while and not likely to last very long) Maybe the answer can't be posted while the question is in probation, but do save it and post automatically later if the editing is done by then, on the original site if it stays or on the migrated site if it moves.
    – AaronD
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 21:11
  • @AaronD When a question is closed, as your wetting an answer, you are notified of that status chnage
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 13, 2016 at 22:07
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I think what is happening to your question is that an individual marked it to get closed. It went into a review queue.

Once in the review queue other users had to vote on it. That can sometimes take a bit depending on time of day and other variables. Having a question get stuck in a cue for migration can be painful.

I will say, I find it very odd that your question was migrated to the motor vehicle SE from the electrical engineering SE when it is clearly an electrical question. I wish I could plumb the depths of their heads but alas, I am unable to perform those godlike powers.

I know this really does not answer your question but I hope it gives you some insight into how the review cue works here at Stack Exchange.

I will say this in closing. SE has been a great thing for me personally. It has allowed me to get peer review on a number of subjects and has allowed to interact with a plethora of professionals in various fields that I work in and am interested in. Most all of my questions have been answered with multiple answers and the best ones have just organically floated to the top due to the voting mechanisms.

I hope you stick around long enough to discover the better points of SE despite this rough first time experience.

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Such thing might sound nice and will indeed be good, but it's not feasible as far as I can tell.

Main reason is, how can the site know that an answer is still "in progress"? Suppose a user starts typing in the "Your Answer" text area, then leaves. For 5, 10, 30, 100 minutes. For how long will it delay closing the question? Even worse, suppose he starts typing, leaves, and returns after 5 minutes to keep writing. And again. And again. 10 times. About a full hour, in which the question can't be closed, then he just leaves, deciding to continue in the next day.

I fear there is no real solution to the problem at stake here. When one is starting to answer, he/she should just be aware of the possibility the question will get closed/migrated (which is also kind of closure on the source site) without a notice.

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  • That's the purpose of the notification and deadman button. I don't know how much extra time that button should provide, but the idea is that once their answer is threatened, the answerer must periodically click it to avoid the answer being thrown away. If they don't click the button periodically, possibly by absence, their answer will be discarded automatically just like it is now with no warning, and the closure/migration will happen.
    – AaronD
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 21:04
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    Worth to mention @AaronD that one can still submit answer even after question is closed, by manually enabling the submit button.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 23:25
  • I don't remember seeing that option. Is it a higher-rep thing? Or did I just miss it?
    – AaronD
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 23:27
  • No, no rep, just some basic tricks. If you have Chrome, right click the disabled submit button, then choose "Inspect Element" (or just "Inspect" in newer versions), then manually remove the "disabled" attribute. There is 4 hours window in the server side, allowing answers to come through. This works only for ordinary closed questions though, not deleted or migrated.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 23:36
  • Oh! I didn't expect a manual change in source code to be necessary! But doesn't that bias the type of expertise that can be useful here? Not all SE sites are technical.
    – AaronD
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 23:39
  • @AaronD that's not official feature, just a semi-secret trick. Officially, people are not supposed to submit answers to closed questions. I mentioned this just because you appear to really care for your answers and them being lost.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 23:42
  • Alright. Thanks for the tip. And it appears that Firefox has that feature too, currently on version 43.0.4.
    – AaronD
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 23:50

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