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There seems to be a concerted effort to close "Hidden Features of X Language" type of questions for the past few days. From what I can see, such questions are dangerously near to being really closed after receiving 4 close votes. Some of the examples are below:
Is there a concerted effort to close this kind of question? IMO these are good questions, and don't deserve to be closed.
If there is a conspiracy responsible I'm going to pout because I have not been invited to join.
I believe what happened is
As far as I know, there has not been any discussion on Meta Stack Overflow to close these questions.
Our previous consensus has been that these questions are acceptable if they are Community Wiki and meet standard question guidelines.
I don't think they're terribly useful (they're almost impossible to edit - a good "hidden features" article would require someone with the ability to go through and delete all the "features" that are well-documented and therefore well-understood by those who know the language). That said, I don't have a problem with them existing...
...Except that they breed like bunnies. Whatever your thoughts are on "Hidden features of C#", we probably don't need one for every single obscure language/library/framework/concept under the sun. If you want to attract more people from your niche community to SO, you're better off posting real questions and real answers, stuff that'll show up in response to searches... Even if you have to make up questions and answer them yourself.
And so if nothing else, we need at least one or two close events in the revision histories of these questions simply as something to point to when a new user complains that "Hidden features of our internal Java utility class" got closed unfairly. If they end up moderator-locked, that's fine too... C# isn't that big of a language - I suspect anything still "hidden" is gonna take a while to find.
I think they should be closed - while hidden is relative term, most of the obscure/not-so-known features have been already discussed. Newer answers are posted when a new developer discovers some feature so far unknown to him and thinks he has unearthed a hidden feature.
They've unearthed and <sup> from the html mine
If a real hidden feature is discovered by some SO user in the future, I believe it should get its own thread for discussion rather than going unnoticed as the 101th answer in an old thread. May be moderators can add it to the corresponding hidden-feature question for completeness of that thread.
Also I believe popular threads might attract a lot of spam; closing would help in that aspect too.
I'm not entirely sure if I started this one, or revived a much older debate, or if this just evolved entirely on its own. But just to set the record straight, I don't think that there's any "concerted effort" going on to close the questions, at least not on my part. I haven't submitted any votes to close.
I don't like the questions, for many of the reasons that have already been discussed, but they're grandfather questions, and they aren't going anywhere.
I'd prefer that the questions simply be locked, if they aren't already. Even if I were really adamant about getting them closed, it would be a waste of time to go through the vote-to-close process because they'll just be reopened within minutes anyway.
There are far worse attrocities being committed on a daily basis. Better to focus on those and make sure that the situation is contained.
