5

I came across a question which is now two months old. It is unclear what the OP does or why this problem occurs. The current answer seems wrong to me. I asked the OP some details and never got an answer. I have the impression that there will be no activity here and would like to close this question.

Do we have a general policy what to do with those questions? What do you suggest?

1
  • 2
    Good question; I'd vote to close, however, I prefer to let the community deal with this sort of thing instead of using op-power on it. Anyone else have thoughts?
    – user5
    Feb 13, 2014 at 16:32

2 Answers 2

4

If you're pretty sure there isn't enough information to answer the question, you could close it as "unclear what you're asking". If you think you know what the asker is asking, you could edit the question to include those details to make the post more answerable.

As a moderator, you're empowered to take action when the community doesn't step in. On such an old post, it's not going to break anything if you close it unilaterally. If users want to see it opened, they can edit it to fix the problems and then vote to reopen, or come to this post and present a nice, constructive, well-reasoned, logical argument for reopening it. If that happens, you could choose to reopen it with just one click of your mouse. :D

As long as you're willing to help guide the community towards reopening it if that's what they want, you shouldn't have any problems. Hope this helps.

2
  • do closed questions get automatically deleted after a time?
    – puser
    Apr 25, 2014 at 16:31
  • 2
    @puser - If they're negatively scored and have no positively scored answers, then yes, the Community bot will remove them after some time.
    – jmort253
    Apr 25, 2014 at 16:50
1

Presuming we can change the close reasons, maybe we could add an option along the lines of:

Not Enough Information

There's currently not enough information provided to determine the cause of the issue. This may be a one-off issue due to the user's platform or any other extraneous circumstance.

It's certainly a subtle difference from "Unclear What You're Asking", but perhaps an important distinction?

2
  • 1
    Except the number of close reasons we can add is pretty limited, so it's best to close as "unclear what you're asking" and then supplement that with a nice, actionable comment that explains to the asker, or other editors in the community, what must happen to improve the post.
    – jmort253
    Feb 17, 2014 at 0:46
  • 1
    That's kind of what I figured, but thought it was worth throwing the thought out there. I'm generally pretty annoyed by the flag/close menu anyway.... Feb 17, 2014 at 1:20

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .