Megan has written a post on the Stack Overflow blog about changes that are planned/upcoming on the Stack Exchange platform.
I've seen a bunch of discussion about it on chat - but it feels like having it purely on the blog is a little clunky.
So specifically - what does the MSE community feel about the proposed post notices for closed questions? What's missing, or what should be added? What are some of the lessons we've learnt that could be helpful here?
Update: We've changed the post notices for question askers so that they do not see the usernames of close voters listed - this includes askers with the close/reopen vote privilege.
We considered making it so that post owners with sufficient rep could still see the list, but decided against it primarily for cost/benefit reasons: the way our code is constructed right now, a lot of other code relies on a person being classified as either a post owner or a privileged user, but not both. This separation makes sense in most places, just not in this instance. And because the likelihood of a higher-rep user having their question closed is lower (and they’re more likely to know how to access the voters if necessary), we felt that this was an appropriate tradeoff.
We discussed changing the post notice language for users who do have permissions but decided to leave it as-is, so that still indicates that both the post owner and those with close/reopen vote privileges can see the names. Because post owners are still able to see who voted to close/reopen their question by going into the post history, it would be inaccurate to say that they do not have access to that information. It's merely harder to reach (and lower rep users are much less likely to find it).
We think that the small change we've made is the best first step in solving this problem. It makes it much more difficult for users who might be angry to lash out at voters, while still being honest with voters that the post owner can see who voted on their post. And we're definitely open to feedback on this approach!
The biggest thing I'd suggest changing is who we show the list of close voters in the notice to.
We're trying to prevent that feeling of being ganged up on, right? And while it's not nearly so prominent, the list of people who closed your question is still right there. I'd also ask that those close voters are only shown to those that have the close vote privilege. That prevents newbies from attacking curators, prevents them from feeling ganged up on (at least by closing), and doesn't hide it from those who know enough about the site to cast a close vote.
I don't think it's a good option to remind users of to the option to 'post a new one' in this banner. My gut feeling says it will only lead to repeated questions, worded slightly different but not enough to make it clear. If authors decide to edit their question without much improvement, then at least the question stays closed and requires no further caretaking (except maybe from the Reopen Votes review queue). If they post a new one, that's more work for the community and the author is more likely to hit a question ban.
There's a few things that could be tweaked.
It should be clearer that editing your question is the preferred alternative. Nothing's going to frustrate a new user than multiple closures and a potential question ban. Something like "You could edit your question. If you have a different problem, you may want to ask a new question instead"
"On hold" is meant to be a kinder, gentler alternative to "Closed". It might be worth considering integrating it.
Folks react to closure badly. Rather than letting new users see who closed the question, we might actually have that as a N reputation privilege. Users don't need to know who closed something as much as how to get things reopened.
The existing notice already asks users to edit their question. Still, despite this, users are unaware of the fact that an edit will push their question into the Reopen Votes queue, and they believe that it will not accomplish much.
I'd recommend adding an extra sentence to the notice to the effect of:
Editing your question now will place it in a queue where users will consider it for potential reopening.
In addition to that, I'd also go a few steps further and make the notice smarter, e.g.
A few things I would suggest.
If we're going the route of showing different messages to the author and to the public, we should take the opportunity to put improvement steps first.
Your question has been put on hold because other users feel they do not have enough information to give you a satisfying response. In tandem with comments you've received, try to edit your question to be more specific about the problem you're having.
On Hold. This question has been closed because it needs details or clarity. It is not currently accepting answers.
Idiomatically, the word "Closed" means something different on this site than it means on other sites. A new user who sees their post closed will feel like they've lost the chance to ask the question they want; "On Hold" at least implies that there's still a chance to improve. Yes, the text following the statement should clarify things, that closure is intended to be a temporary state, but we should still lead with a sentiment that more holistically represents how we want the user to feel.
As I showed in my example suggestion, I'm not saying we should completely eliminate use of the word (since the goal is to be honest with the user about what has happened to their post), but it would be good to lead with other words that have different connotations first.
On a closed post, the only indications as to why answers can't be added are at the top in the title, and in between the question and its answers. There's no indication near where the answer box is supposed to be, which means that on questions with lots of existing answers, it requires quite a bit of scrolling to determine why it can't be answered.
Additionally, new users may not understand the meaning of "closed", "on hold", or "marked as duplicate" and the resulting cause, that new answers can't be added.
According to a famous micro-study of new users:
Why can't I answer?
Okay, my test group weren't meant to be posting answers. Still, they identified this as another weird thing. Having just read that banner, and seeing "anyone can post an answer", the next thing many of them did was click on a question to see if its topic matched their question. When they scrolled down to read the answers, there weren't any, and they discovered that they couldn't post an answer either.
"What? But it said anyone could post an answer - how am I meant to do that?"
Of course, the question they're looking at has been closed. This raises several points:
- they didn't notice [on hold] in the title (or didn't place any significance on it)
- they scrolled past the close message
- there was no way to tell why they couldn't answer
When they did notice the close reason, it was generally fairly good at explaining what had happened, so that much is working. Perhaps we just need to emphasise [sic] the reason, and add a note to the bottom of the page in place of the answer controls explaining why the controls aren't present.
I suggest adding a notice to the bottom of closed questions, to the effect of:
This question has been closed; no new answers are being accepted.
Of course, the micro-study isn't meant to be an exhaustive look at what all new users think; it just raises some salient points as to how they might think, so I quoted it here.
Another thing that could be helpful is to provide a status with respect to the reopen process on the close message itself. This would tell the user whether:
So, a hypothetical message might look like this:
Closed. This question needs more cowbell. It is not currently accepting answers. Learn more. This question will be placed in reopen review if is edited within the next 6 days and 5 hours.
Private feedback for you: This question is seriously lacking in cowbell. Questions on SNL.SE are expected to have lots of cowbell. Edit the question to add more cowbell. Please see our help information on how to accomplish this.
Please don't hide detailed information about the reason for closure - from anyone.
For efficient site curation, the list of names is much less important than the reason for closure. On many sites, a question which has been closed may be edited to fit site standards by other users, not necessarily the OP. For this reason, it may be important to have visibility about the reason for closure. (On smaller sites where everyone knows everyone, it might also be useful to be able to ping close-voters, but that's less important.)
With only one example to look at, I can't tell whether "This question needs details or clarity" is code for "closed as unclear what you're asking" or if it's just a generic sentence for a closed question. Please continue to distinguish - including in the publicly visible banner - between different close reasons. It's important to understand exactly why a question has been closed, for anyone who wants to edit to improve it for reopening. In an ideal world, there'd always be a nice helpful comment to explain the exact problem with this specific question - but that's not something we can rely on. Different close reasons are a useful tool to accomplish this objective, and it should still remain abundantly clear which reason was used and what can be done to improve the question.
In other words: WHY are you removing the following useful text from the close banner?
Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking.
What's replacing it, in the draft image, sounds much more generic and less useful.
I'm no UX expert, but I find plain "Learn more" links very meh. The way I see it, hyperlinked text should tell the user what they are going to see if they click it, and especially if they might be a bit put off by the "on hold/closed" banner in the first place. I don't instantly know what "Learn more" links to.
The current banner does that in a simplist, but "at least we try" way: it says you're going to see a help center, some page that will explain you what/how to ask, and something about editing. Great!
My two cents, add some explanation in the new banner. Currently I only see the "Learn more" link - does it go to the help center? The "How to Ask" page? Instead of a dull "Learn more", why not something like...
[...] It is not currently accepting answers. Learn more about the "on hold"1 status and the possible steps to reopen it. (and maybe an additional sentence redirecting to the "How to Ask" page)
That tells you, in a single sentence, that there are "statuses", and that while your question is currently on hold, there's a workflow to reopen it (see also Sonic's answer about the reopening part).
1 Or "closed", if applicable.
Two major things, and one remediation to what I feel is a tradeoff we’re going to (be forced to) make.
The presentation needs to significantly de-emphasize “or ask a new [question]”, and:
This is covered in more detail in @Glorfindel’s answer, so I’ll focus this answer on the other item.
Right now, with the exception of the list of close-voters (which I understand is the point of making this public/private separation), all the information about why the user’s question is closed is identical between the public and private view.
The header leads the user to believe he’s getting specific, private feedback about his particular question, but in reality he’s not: he’s getting the same generic rationale as the public does.
We’ve had closures forever and closure banners forever and users still ask “but why was my question closed? The banner says it’s Too Broad but it’s not, it’s quite specific”, etc. The particular suggestions for improvement almost always show up in the comments.
I don’t know what SO has planned for changes to comments, but as I said, there is usually a wealth of specific feedback in the comments which could give more focused guidance to the OP in this “private feedback” channel, and I think it should appear there somehow.
Additionally, if both parties know such feedback is private (gated by reputation threshold or editing badge, etc), then a peaceable dialog is more likely to occur. Maybe we could even obscure the commenter’s usernames until the OP accumulates a “positive question record”.
We might also limit the dialog in some way: the OP and/or each participant is allowed N comments, and after that, no more. Either the question gets improved or it’s swept up in the dustbin of history. No more endless debates about “you need to improve your question in this manner” // “the question is fine! Just stop being a rules lawyer and answer!”.
The user gets his feedback, and he can either improve his question or not, and no one is tied up in endless, useless, enervating debate.
If we do this, then I’d say we’d need an automatic link to a chat room under every question, because whatever the talk about this not being a social network, and comments being used only to suggest improvements, that’s absolutely not the only way they are used, and with us being human it never will be.
The comments are where humans come into contact, build relationships, build the community, a sense of a shared mission, that makes this whole thing tick.
We can limit comments proper to feedback on posts, and even limit the number you get per post, but we will still need a way for people to talk, and that invitation needs to happen where people organically meet here even if they didn’t seek out conversation: on Q&A.
As someone who closes lots of things, I've noticed that very few people ever try to engage after closure. That's a problem, and it clearly plays into resentment of the community itself. Let's pick on the one major reopenable reason on SO, minreprex minimal reproducible example.
Questions is posted, but doesn't have enough data to answer. Maybe you have comments hinting at what's missing, maybe not. What is a new user supposed to do? We're feeding them the list of people who closed the question but... why? As a long time user, I know I can ping dupehammers and maybe close voters, but only if I type their username out fully. And what does editing do? I want my question reopened, not edited! Nothing to them suggests a path forward. What I'd love to see here is
I think we can do better here. Maybe reopening won't solve all the problems, but it might be a step in the right direction
First, thank you for finally working on improving guidance around closed questions. The site is currently very bad at guiding askers towards turning an unanswerable question into an answerable one.
Distinguishing guidance for close voters and guidance for the asker is absolutely a step in the right direction.
I don't understand why the guidance to the asker has become less informative. It should be the other way round! Start with the current text of the existing close reason. The problem with current close reason text is that it isn't informative enough, not that it's too long.
Don't show who closed the question specifically to the asker. That makes it personal. Show who closed the question in a different box, or only as part of the question history. The point is to emphasize why and de-emphasize who. Do show the list of voters to the community, at least to other people with the close privilege: that's important for accountability.
A very important thing that's missing is that questions can be reopened. The guidance for the asker should make it clear that closed questions can be reopened without having to open another page.
I don't think stating “private feedback for you” is a good idea. I'm not even sure that part needs to be hidden from others, and it should certainly not be stated in this way. “Private feedback for you” says that this was written specifically for this particular user, which is wrong: what follows is generic text. You're building an expectation of finely tailored guidance and then going against that expectation by providing a generic blunt hammer.
Here's a better starting point for the guidance for the asker.
This question was closed because it is unclear what kind of answers you expect, or what part of the problem you are asking about. Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need.
To clarify your question,
editit. Once it has been edited, the question may be reopened.
(where edit is a link that does the same as the “edit” button)
I see that you're removing the “on hold” terminology. At least I hope you are. It was gratuitously confusing to have two names for the same thing (with an extremely subtle distinction — whether the first edit pushes the question to the reopen queue — which it's pointless to invent a word for), and doubly confusing because “on hold” has a meaning which is completely different from its normal meaning.
In a second step, close voters should be able to provide more specific guidance, typically with a link to a meta thread that discusses a specific type of question or issue. This is currently available in a very limited way through off-topic close reasons, but that's not nearly enough, since it isn't available for anything but “off-topic” and the number of such reasons is extremely limited. Currently, close voters can provide such reasons by posting comments, but it's a hassle to maintain a library of guidance text and meta links: this should be built into the system.
I suggest to not hide the list of close voters on small sites.
On small sites, where users "know" each other, the visible list might encourage users to make reviews carefully - after all the whole community will see their name in the list of close voters.
If the list is no longer shown to the community, what will prevent robo-reviewers? There are no audits on the small sites and unfavourable patterns will no longer be visible.
