I know that  (I was also ), but, what if the question is really trivial, so trivial it can be found in the manual? Shall I delete it?  I would delete it right away but I've heard that by deleting questions you might get penalized. But in  no one has invested an effort in my question and probably never will...  EDIT: thank you for all your responses, they encouraged me to keep the question there. You are absolutely right it allmost surely will be useful to someone - because many people, as well as myself, when they have problem they start by typing it into google, instead of studying the docs. I've been sometimes downvoted for stating this approach but thats just how are fast society works. Google is faster than searching any docs, especially in combo with Stackoverflow...
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Meta appears to have come to a consensus that when a user asks a question that is easily answered with Google that we should not close the question but rather answer it properly.        However, what does this mean about asking questions that can be answered easily with a Google search?  More specifically, should we encourage or discourage such behavior, and how?  Here are some reasons that I can think of for each option.  Reasons to Encourage  ""   And that includes answers easily accessible via Google search   Sometimes we want to  another answer to a  that   Sometimes we want to save others the Google searching we did by asking and answering the question ourselves. In this case, we did do the research, but the question by necessity must not show research effort.  Reasons to Discourage  Question quality may drop, as users will feel less incentive to Google their problem. This will also probably result in a greater quantity of questions as well that have already been answered on StackOverflow, as Google searches often result in StackOverflow answers.
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Stuff like polls, recommendations based on subjective constraints, puzzles, webcomics etc. do not belong on the serious main SE sites, where professionals should be considered at work and having just a few spare minutes ("code's compiling") to answer questions, so they should not be distracted by such things. However, I'd also like to have a home for these things still using the SE engine. For the reason I mentioned before, this needs to be a separate place though. Let's call it four.[sitename-here].com.
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I came across  answer earlier today, which I deemed trivial (all it gave was the solution, not an explanation of why it worked or how to prevent this from happening in the future, and was practically copied from the comments above, which were posted about two minutes before).   I left a comment explaining why I downvoted, and a few people took offense to it:     @RichardJ.RossIII You're downvoting an answer that answers the OPs question? – modifiable lvalue        @RichardJ.RossIII habitually violates the rules. Since this answer is not wrong or dangerous and is in fact useful, it should not be downvoted. +1 to compensate. – Jim Balter   My question is, is there a policy against doing this? Should we, as a community, accept and encourage such answers? Personally, I think the whole question should be deleted, as it is far from useful, but that's not the point here.  Generally speaking, I save my upvotes for answers which either helped me personally, or do an exceptional amount towards answering a question. I downvote a lot, as I have high standards (that's not to say that I'm perfect, however).  The bottom line is this: should I be more conservative with my downvoting patterns?
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A user walks into Stack&nbsp;Overflow and . The answer for his question is in the first result of a Google search. Well, it is the fourth result, to be precise, but the first link in the discussion under the first link leads there anyway.  Long story short: the question is very simple and the answer is two clicks away in Google. What should I do? Should I give user the link to answer or should I point him to the Google Search results? What is Stack&nbsp;Overflow, a place to learn something (even if it is googling) or a black box "insert question, receive answer" machine?  (Meta&nbsp;Stack&nbsp;Overflow's policies prevent me from posting a link to Google? WTF.)
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I see a lot of good, well-writen and constructive questions (that are probably not only good for me) closed, by various reasons which I fail to digest, so I propose the idea that questions with n upvotes should not be closable.  This would be in my opinion very much in the spirit of "", and unless I'm wrong, it would be beneficial for the users to choose by themselves whether the site should have or not x question. The ones which are low quality never get many upvotes anyway.  The only cons I can think of are... DB space? And at a minimum there's the pro of more popular pages with more ads (for the admins), and questions people like (for the users).  I'm also counting for , in the lines of Google's "", but questions  are more like what I'm aiming at (probably that question has not many upvotes for this though).
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I know this seems like a good idea, but this far into the game you should be able to tell from network behavior that I'm not a spammer…  I had a compound question. I broke it up because breaking it up was possible—it probably isn't even necessary in that it wouldn't otherwise get closed. Now I doubt either of my questions will be easily answered, but it stinks when you want to run (irl) to have to wait on a question timer which means posting one at a later time. Can't we fight spammers more effectively in a different way?  You know it's my intent to ask the question (or you'd give me a captcha). You also know that historically my questions have been   Can't we find a way to make this not stupid?
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Most (if not all) SE sites have something in their help centre along these lines:     You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.   My question is: Is the emphasis on it being a "problem you face" to discourage     Chatty, open-ended questions [that] diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.     or does it actually have to be your own question? (Let's assume it otherwise fits the criteria for being a good question.)  It's also followed up by this paragraph     If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here. However, if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ______ to me”, then you are probably OK. (Discussions are of course welcome in our real time web chat.)   which (combined with the contrast to "chatty, open-ended questions" above) makes me feel that as long as you describe a practical, answerable question that could be a problem that you face (but in real life happens to not be), you are okay; however the letter of the rule indicates that it should be your own problem.  The main reason that I am asking is that in beta I feel like it is a good policy to ask high-quality example questions, in order to:   help define the scope of the site attract new visitors who are interested by the question and/or its answers build up a bank of good, high-quality questions in the early stages help the site show up on Google question results and drive more traffic   However, I want to know if it's discouraged from doing so.  Edit. Let's give an example to make it clearer.   I'm on Pets.SE at the moment. Here are some questions from the front page.   How can I stop my dogs from barking at animals on television? Will crickets lay barren eggs? What are the arguments against neutering a guinea pig?   If those questions didn't apply to you or a problem you faced, could you still ask them? Or does the fact that they are not an "actual problem you face" mean that it doesn't matter that it's otherwise a "practical, answerable question"?
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Lot of people have posted these kind of questions, but mine deals with another perspective of the same problem, so before you cry out duplicate! just hear me out.  I'm a pretty new user on Stack Overflow, and a rookie in the world of Javascript and Jquery.  So I wanted to make something clear...  So I asked some questions based on my knowledge, and what I do not understand, while other more experienced users kept pounding me down and down-voting me.  Well, in my understanding, Stack Overflow was made with the aim that anyone can ask, and anyone can answer.  Old users constantly say This is a duplicate! or Why didn't you check the FAQ!. Now let me ask you something, Will a new user go through all of the Stack Overflow just to see whether it is acceptable to you or not?  OR does he even know that we have a FAQ?  Seriously guys, if you think that a person's question are a waste of time, why do you take the time to down-vote him??  Old users should understand that we are just wanting to get an answer, and not try intimidate us. Give us some space!   I mean seriously, after getting bullied again and again , you think anyone would want to stay on longer?  I agree some new users are just there for spamming, but hey, not all of us are like that!   Just give us some breathing room, and come on, it isn't that hard to be nice to someone.
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No, not like this:    Hear me out!  As Stack Overflow grows, it becomes increasingly ridden with extremely newbie and mediocre questions. It's just natural. The team are fighting hard to keep the crap out, but there are many very basic questions that are okay on their own. They don't deserve to be kicked out* - they are just very, very, very basic and/or localized.   Too much basicness tires users who are interested in discussing more advanced topics.  As has been discussed many times over, the voting system is not suited to identify advanced questions due to what is known as the . A group of people will vote on what they understand, which puts truly expert questions at a natural disadvantage that a democratic voting system can't overcome.  Now, there is a small number of users on Stack Overflow who I, as a user, know share my basic values (like, teaching a man to fish rather than fishing for them); I also know they are experts in their fields. It is safe to assume that what these users regard an interesting question worthy of attention, is likely to be interesting to me as well.      The idea is to introduce an opt-in "follow" mechanism that allows followed users to share what they find interesting, with very little fuss and on a purely opt-in basis.   Allow every SO user to follow any other SO user with a certain minimum rep, say 3000.   To every user who is being followed (or every user), display a new link underneath every question, "Recommend".    Introduce a new filtered view somewhere, named "Recommended". The view will show me all questions that my followed users are recommending.   Whenever I browse a list of questions, highlight those questions that have been recommended by my followed users. (I haven't put much thought into how to implement this graphically - you get the drift.)      I'm not especially fond of social networking, and I think most of it doesn't have a place on SO. But I'm starting to think this specific thing could be the right way to go in order to tell apart expert content from the 10000th dreary "how do I upload a file" question.  This is an entirely opt-in feature - unless I actively follow some users, I will never notice this.   Maybe for a bit of ego-stroking, the profile page can show how many users follow you. Or even who. Everything else would simply be kept under wraps - no publication of follower data in the data dump, no follower leagues or anything like that.      * At least not under current SO rules. Maybe those rules need to be changed - but that is a different discussion.
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Subtitle:  Should beginner's questions be off-topic strictly because they are beginner's questions? The sorts of questions that newbie programmers ask has come up before many times in side discussions, and comes up constantly on the main site.  Here are two examples from today:   Both of the above questions are well-formed, specific, answerable definitively, not open to opinions and are otherwise directly on-topic for StackOverflow. However both questions were downvoted and closed by users who said they were off-topic because they were too basic in nature.  To quote one particularly pointed comment:  This question appears to be off-topic because it is trivially answerable by reading a beginners' language tutorial.  That pretty much sums it up. Here's another case posted yesterday:  This is another beginner's question.  The topic is fairly elementary.  The answer can likely be found in Strustrup's book, or any number of other books that we recommend.  Considering only that it is a beginner's question of a fundamental nature, should the question be considered off-topic? Lots of questions are posted from lazy people who are just looking to be spoon-fed answers.  Those questions should all be closed because they never meet the quality guidelines.  That's not what I'm asking about here.  What I'm asking about is just the elementray nature of the question.  If the question is elementary, but otherwise meets our quality and topical requirements, is it off-topic? I have always thought that .  But enthusiasts come in all shapes and sizes, from the bright-green newbie writing their first program to the grizzled veterans who have seen and done it all a million times before.  I have always felt that SO's stated audience does not, or should not, discriminate based on the expertise of the asker. Some  that newbie questions are off-topic because they aren't interesting enough for the answerers.  But this seems highly subjective to me.  After all, every question is a &quot;no-duh softball&quot; to someone.  Just today I provided what I thought was a  to a problem, only to learn a few minutes later that KonradRudolph and Yakk had come up with the  over a year before.  No-duh. It seems to me that this has been coming up much more recently.  Sometimes I'll chime in with a comment to the downvoters and close-voters suggesting that the level of expertise is not a parameter in deciding if a question is topical.  The downvoters will often agree.  But we don't have a difinitive resource to point to that says this is so -- it doesn't say it in the FAQs, and I've not found anything difinitive in meta. So what says meta?  Can a question about basics be on-topic for Stack Overflow?  If it can be off-topic, how do we know where to draw the line?
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Looks like there's a small bug in the UI: I posted a question here on meta.SE which ended up being just something dumb I was doing and no use to anyone in the future. At first I posted an answer saying what the dumb thing was, but then I realized that the whole thing had no value, so I deleted the answer, and then deleted the question — whereupon it asked me:  Delete this answered question? We do not recommend deleting questions with answers because doing so deprives future readers of this knowledge. Repeated deletion of answered questions can result in your account being blocked from asking. Are you sure you wish to delete?  (Screenshot below) Probably shouldn't ask (or add to the tally) if the only answers are deleted ones...
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The downside... It seems like the type of question that would be a duplicate - but I don't see any, so I'll ask anyway. I'm finding it difficult to not visit Stack Overflow for any significant amount of time. I wake up in the morning, and check Stack Overflow at 5:30 am. I check it before I close my laptop to head off to work. I check it when I connect at the office. I check it throughout the day. How do I break the combination? The upside... I have explored more methods of accomplishing tasks than ever before after having registered here and viewing some questions. I've been introduced to many new tools, practices, and theories about development that I can honestly say make me more confident as a developer.
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Another &quot;miséricorde&quot;:  Consider  (emphasis added):  I think its okay, please dont take any efforts for me. I personally do not feel the system helps ask good questions. I dont know why asking for a software in this case is bad. Basically I needed a command that would give me this data. There is no other way I could have asked the question. I could have changed the question just for the sake of changing. I feel I am better off elsewhere. Thanks for your very very prompt responses. Regards. Bye. – user1744649  We just lost another user due to inadequate guidance on what questions are allowed.  The  by the time they are banned has been proven incorrect. Given that , we need a better way to make sure that users can understand how to ask good questions and what types of questions are allowed. I suggest that we warn newcomers, in a clear but positive tone, when one of their questions has been closed, downvoted (to a score of -2 or lower), or deleted, so that they don't repeat the same mistake.  This is probably best done the next time the user asks a question, and should appear as an &quot;interstitial&quot; page prior to reaching the actual Ask Question form.  The page should not appear to users:  with at least 50 (or perhaps 75 or 100) reputation that have asked a good question since the last downvoted/closed/deleted question that have fixed a bad question and had it reopened/undeleted/upvoted.  The content of the page should be adapted based on the specific problem with the previous question.  I would imagine something similar to the following (example for a question closed as off topic on Super User):  Before you ask another question... One or more of your previous questions have been closed as off topic. The scope of on-topic questions is defined in the , as follows:  What kind of questions can I ask here? Super User is for computer enthusiasts and power users. If you have a question about …  computer hardware, computer software, or personal and home computer networking  and it is not about …  programming and software development, video games or consoles, websites or web services like Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress, electronic devices, media players, cell phones or smart phones, except insofar as they interface with your computer, issues specific to corporate IT support and networks, asking for a shopping or product recommendation,  … then you’re in the right place to ask your question!  Please make sure that the question you are about to ask is on topic as described above. If you need help determining whether your question can be asked on this site, you can ask for advice on  or . You may also want to edit your previous question to address any problems associated with it. To ensure a high standard of content quality and prevent disruption to the community, users who repeatedly post low-quality questions  Continue  The  doesn't address this issue as it is shown only to users with 10 reputation or less (rather than up to 50 and possibly higher) and does not address the specific problem with previous low-quality questions.  The point of this feature request is to provide a easily understood targeted message that actually teaches the user about what happened with the previous question he or she asked.  The EULA is generic and may not have conveyed the intended message clearly if the user still asked a low-quality or off-topic question. For reference,  currently has 143 reputation and the proposed message would probably have been shown after the first closed or deleted question. I know this can be a complex feature to implement, since it needs to be adaptive, but this should help eliminate confusion on what the rules are and minimize the incidence of good-faith users getting post-banned.
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This feature request is a response to  Two days ago,  suggested that we . However, given that  (hat tip ) as well as ...  262  103   ... I suggest that we take it a step further. Let's extend the heuristics for detecting—and blocking—low-quality questions to enforce unique titles, or at least flag new questions with duplicate titles automatically. We can leave the precise heuristics of detecting a duplicate title up to the Stack Overflow development team. I have no delusions about the fact that a few questions will &quot;slip through the cracks.&quot; The goal here is to be proactive about minimizing the number of duplicates, and I think that the best place to start is the existing heuristics for detecting low-quality questions. After all, duplicate question titles are bad for a number of reasons: They often indicate a question that is itself a duplicate, but perhaps just as importantly, they decrease the signal-to-noise ratio when searching for questions. I honestly can't think of any reason that duplicate question titles are helpful, unless you are asking for a solution to the same problem in a different programming language. Even then, I think that it would be acceptable to rephrase the question to say &quot;How do I do X in (insert programming language here)?&quot;  makes a good point about the potential problems with this solution:  I have a hunch that if we do that, people will find ways to circumvent it (changing case or punctuation, adding random spam), and we'll end up stuck in a an arms race.  We may get stuck in an arms race with some users, but I honestly think that many people new to Stack Overflow just don't understand the etiquette of asking questions here. If we could even convince people to rephrase their question more clearly 20% of the time, I think that it would be a tremendous boon to the community. Furthermore, remember that heuristics for low-quality questions already exist, arms race or no.
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Today I came across an OBVIOUSLY good answer in /review. It had 7 upvotes, contained lists, paragraphs of explanation, and well-applied sample code. It was also moderately long. How does a question like this get flagged for review? I don't really know how the algorithm works.   If this is low-quality then I feel bad about all of my answers.  Here's a  if you care to see it in context. It's not really a huge problem (as Bart's comment emphasizes), but this seems like an extreme outlier in every measurable aspect.
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One of the most popular questions on Stack Overflow,  has recently been deleted. Why was this done, rather than migrated to programmers.SE?  Does this not fall into the broad purview of Programmery questions, or is it really off topic?  I'm somewhat neutral on this myself, as I usually oppose "fun" questions that are there simply for fun's sake, but this is a rather old SO question and historically other similar questions from SO's infancy have been tolerated with grandfather status. Can anyone make a strong argument for or against?
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I have asked  which I don't honestly think is a duplicate of the question linked as motivation for closing. They are both about java, but one is about the language and the other one about its applications in the real world. They are sure related but not exact duplicates by any means. Yet it took just a few minutes to find 5 people willing to close it.  Why is it so? Do similar questions really pollute SO so much? Is closing a question like that so urgent that you can't leave it open for a while and see if it meets interest in the community? Do people just do it because they have the power to do so and they like to use it?  SO should be a community site about programming, not about who's the quickest sheriff.  EDIT: edited subject as I meant "close" instead of "delete"