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I have encountered this question on Psych & Neurosci SE. It's a question that's actually quite interesting for a psychophysicist.

However, it's basically a one-liner without prior research effort. We ask users to at least show us some of the research that went into it, which, in general, leads to more clear, and more focused questions.

Indeed this post has, at the time of this writing, received 2 close votes - question is 1) too broad and 2) it is unclear. I would've added a close vote on the basis of under-researchedness, barred I'm a mod and I'm keeping my distance [for now].

Anyway, as seen in the comments, this user is oblivious to why their question is receiving close-votes. Of course this person can see why, but seems not to understand anyway. In addition, many newbies cannot see the close-votes being cast on questions (rep <250) and this information is highly informative for them to learn the conventions on each site.

So while the above question is simply an example, I think it shows a general problem; newbies can't see why their question is being shot at behind the screens.

Hence my question:

Can the reason(s) of the close votes not be shown on each question for newbies? It may interfere with the privilege award system and so on, but oftentimes close votes are not accompanied by comments. As a possible feature request, a message may appear like, taking the linked post as an example:

This post has received close vote(s) based on

  • Unclear what you're asking
  • Too broad
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  • IIRC on other sites mods use specific post notices, for example citation needed.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jul 15, 2018 at 19:43
  • @rene you mean banners? That's not really of a help here; the question is facing closure and we don't have a banner for each close-vote reason. We use them for serious stuff, and mostly for answers, like unreferenced, unsubstantiated answers and so on.
    – AliceD
    Commented Jul 15, 2018 at 19:45
  • 1
    I was going to make the same suggestion, but first made a search here to verify if the question hasn't been asked before already, which brought me here. However, now I am wondering how we can draw more attention to this feature request, so the SE team will consider to implement this idea. I think this is a huge problem for low-frequency sites, where the time lag between asking a question and getting a final close vote is way higher than on Stackoverflow.
    – Doc Brown
    Commented Feb 18, 2021 at 15:10
  • @DocBrown I totally agree. I can perhaps email a person from SE corp.
    – AliceD
    Commented Feb 18, 2021 at 15:31

1 Answer 1

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Since this is already done for duplicate votes/flags, I think it will indeed be a good idea to show the reasons in a banner on top of the question to the question author only.

Other users with low rep should NOT see the close votes/reasons IMO, as they're not yet familiar with the site enough to understand and can't really do anything about it anyway.

OP and high rep users, on the other hand, can edit the question to try and salvage it before it's being closed.

Also, unlike with duplicates, I don't think there should be a binding close vote for the OP.

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