I came across many of the highly rated questions are "closed as not constructive". For example  . This question has 146 upvoted, 105 favourites; will be most valuable question.   I could understand this question may be not programming related; but still related the best way of code design. Since we don't have stack for programming design; I think we can use stackoverflow here.   Now My concern is; what is the objective of closing a question? At one point of time are we  planing to cleanup those questions from the DB? if yes we could loose such valuable question rit? And How we are planing to differentiate really not constructive question from design based question which is highly voted?
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Useful threads are being closed as "not constructive:"     This question is not a good fit to our Q&amp;A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. See the .   For example,  was very useful for me since I am new to obfuscation and the question gave me a start. Also that question has lots of votes and bookmarks - these alone are the  markers of usefulness. The question is closed anyway. No idea why.  Same happened to my question, , which received one bookmark immediately.  I was waiting for an answer with the two products downloaded and installed.  I desired that experienced people would share their thoughts and point me to the better one. No. Closed. I.e. I must go to some other forum and ask there or I must search on Google and write down the pros and cons of each myself. I am not asking questions just because I have tons of time and want to chat; I need an answer, that's why I am asking. I am asking because I think that SO has the most professional people to answer and because I didn't find a good answer in Google.  I saw other questions closed which I myself found to be useful and I bookmarked some of the closed questions.  UPDATE  If I want people who have an experience which I do not have with some software products and I want to see which product is better in the terms of usability and reliability, not just better in terms of the price or has a better official website or better described on the official website, how do I ask this question? Or is this a question which I cannot ask on SO? I.e. this sort of information is not available on SO?  Is this one breaking the rules as well:  ?
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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"
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As a newcomer to StackOverflow, I recently asked my first . I wanted to start with a fairly safe general question, to get the feel for how the site worked. My question was intended to be programming-related, but my original wording was not clear enough, so another user decided to close it.  I've re-phrased my question, and had received one useful answer before the question was closed, but I'm not sure what the procedure is after your question is closed to allow people to post answers again...  I've checked the FAQ and About pages, searched the SO questions, but have had no luck. Could someone point me in the right direction as to how I get my question re-opened, or if it is possible to do at all?
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Close reasons still have links to the FAQ in them - these should be referred to as the Help Center, since that's what it is now.   Not Constructive (emphasis obviously mine)     We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, see the FAQ for guidance.  Off Topic (ditto)     Questions on Stack Overflow are expected to relate to programming or software development within the scope defined in the FAQ. Consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement if you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope.  Too Localized (...)     This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.  Not A Real Question (...)     It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.    All of these should be changed to "see this Help Center topic" (or similar). Since, y'know, it's the Help Center, now, not the FAQ.
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Important: This question is being asked here, and not on the Programmers Meta,  because I believe that several SE sites suffer from this same, specific problem.    On Programmers, I see a pattern emerging.   New User sees the "Programmers" site title, and asks their incomplete, "fix my broken code" question. Community members comment that their question is off-topic, and recommend Stack Overflow.  New User says "thanks" and leaves, leaving their undeleted question for the community to clean up.    What seems clear to me is that:   New User has never seen the "What kinds of questions can I ask about here" page, or if they have, they've clicked through it without reading it. New User doesn't know how to move their question to the right place properly  (i.e. post on new site, delete from old site). Community cleanup of such questions is onerous.  The moderators on Programmers, following the principle that the community should moderate itself for the most part, are not proactive about removing such questions unless they're especially egregious. Migration is even more onerous.   OK, so we have the .  Here's what it says about topicality, about halfway down the page:    Note to those who are confused about Programmers' site scope: it's all right there, in black and white.  However, I do notice a problem.  It's circled in red.  That's our fault, the fault of the Programmers community.  What we really meant to say was "Don't ask your code troubleshooting questions here; those belong on Stack Overflow."  Coding tools deserves its own bullet.  We should fix that.  However, what are the chances that the user is actually seeing this, and evaluating whether or not they should ask their question based on this?  So here's my question, in two acts:  ACT I:  Is there a way to highlight the pain points of a particular site to new users specifically, so that we can be very clear that we don't want those questions that are clearly and unambiguously off-topic on our site, before they ask their question?  ACT II: Failing that, is there a way that we can fast-track the removal of such questions so that they no longer pollute our front page?
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I'm out of close votes again today. But I still have 100 flags. How do the mods feel about me flagging questions for closure, even though I would be able to VtC myself, if I weren't already out of votes?  Related: How do the mods feel about me flagging a question for closure (a super obvious code-dump, for example), even if I have CVs remaining, in an attempt to preserve my close votes for less clear cut close decisions?
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SO has long had a policy of closing questions asking for recommendations as "off topic", with the following kind of closure annotation:     Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.   Since we now have , could this response be changed to something more along the lines of:     Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow.  Consider submitting this to Software Recommendations.     An alternative is to have the question simply migrated to Software Recommendations.  This might not produce high-quality questions because there's no a priori reason to believe the question has been posed well, but SR can probably handle those cases.  See also .  A suggestion that a link to the SR rules be included, to ensure the poster understands the not-implied threat of secondary closure, is an excellent one.  Maybe something like this?     Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow.  Consider submitting this to Software Recommendations. Be sure to follow their  to avoid closure there.
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I've noticed a distressing tendency for questions that seem basic or overly short to be immediately closed and downvoted into oblivion.  Case in point:   Within a minute of being asked, this question received 12 downvotes and was closed as "not a real question".  That particular question is a very real, non-trivial question, but it had somewhat poor grammar and looked a little like a much simpler question.  Can we try to be a little more accepting?
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The  shows low quality questions and answers.  When out of close votes I'm not sure what to do with the questions. I can still handle the answers fine as there are no limits on the actions I can take.  But for questions one of the actions (close) requires close votes. Sure, I say ok or skip but without the ability to vote for close the process feels a little pointless as I don't have a tool to say "this is bad" anymore and I'm "wasting" time skipping bad things.  Also I'm not sure how the "not sure" votes are recorded and if that degrades the quality of some collected stats when I repeated skip questions that are clearly bad.  One suggestion might be to not show low quality questions to people that are out of close votes.    Some days later: Now that the initial batch of "low quality posts" are done this might not be that big of an issue any more. Even so it happened to me again that I was out of close votes and got a low quality question that I couldn't do anything about.  Another solution might be to allow the casting of a "should be closed" suggestion just to drive down the questions score a little (i.e. counteracting "looks ok" votes) instead of showing the, unusable, option to close.
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I recently saw a question on Stack Overflow relating to the . The guy wasn't asking for code at all, meerly asking what the process involved.  It was immediately slapped with a comment directing him to the  (which after reading I still couldn't see why the asker was being directed there), and closed shortly thereafter as "Not a real question".  Since I asked this question, it has been suggested that the question was closed because the asker was asing whether he could ask a question, or because he may have been asking how to unlock his iPhone, where I assumed he was asking for the technical specifics of what happened. Both fair points, it may have been my mistake  As Brad has stated the question  received a very positive response. Another relevant question suggested by Brad, but received a negative response:   Now I know some people out there want to be the Stack Overflow Police, and some people are scared of questions that slightly hint at subversive or underhand methods, or that the asker is trying to do something illegal (either for the sake of the site, or for maintaining their own halos).  However in my opinion it is perfectly acceptable to ask about processes and methods, even in the areas of reverse engineering and programming practicies that are invariably used to exploit other software. Questions like "How do I crack software X?" are obviously unacceptable.  I'd like to know what the community thinks about this; what is your opinion?  Is it ok to ask about shady practices, for educational purposes, as long as they are non-specific (in terms of cacking a certain piece of software, or asking for code to unlock iPhones, etc.)
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I'm going to ask this, even though it has some resemblance to other questions, but I think it's important to ask this question in this manner, because it has some semantic meaning that the other questions allude to but do not come out and say.  Should moderators close questions for reasons other than obvious violation of the rules?    I've been noticing a lot of closed questions by moderators lately, with only a single vote.  For example,   I did not ask the question, and i don't know the author, but something bugs me about moderators heavy handedly bypassing the community process of choosing what is and isn't a good question to ask.    True, the community can re-open a closed question, but that's a little bit like being presumed guilty until proven innocent.  I think far fewer people look at closed questions and think "that should be re-opened" than people that look at open questions and think "that should be closed".  I'm not trying to suggest that moderators should have this power taken away, just that they should voluntarily leave questions to the community unless they are obviously violating the rules.  Even good intentions can go bad because someone was in a hurry, or didn't read the question well enough.    I'm also not trying to suggest some kind of recourse for closed questions by moderators.  I think that issue goes away if moderators don't close non-violating questions solely by themselves.  I think, by default, moderators should merely be one vote to close (or migrate) questions, with an option to force close if necessary... but SOP should that moderators votes do not (normally) carry any more weight than anyone elses (again, unless it's an obvious violation of the rules).  Moderators have a purpose, and an important one at that.. but I don't think that purpose is to decide for the community that questions are duplicates or not a real question.  That's the communities job and moderators should not take it away from them.  EDIT:  I think people are missing the point.  I am not making any judgement call as to whether the actions taken by mods in any given circumstance was correct or not.  Even if the community would have done the exact same thing, it's still the communities place to make those decisions by consensus, not a single person unilaterally deciding.  Comments?
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I sometimes come across such questions like that:    The "Not a real question" close reason doesn't exist for long time. It doesn't make sense to answer, comment, or even up/downvote (since there's nothing more to vote for/against it).   Shouldn't such questions be locked as historical ones? Should I flag them for moderator attention or just ignore them?
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The old "too localized" closing reason included "questions that are unlikely to help future visitors".   , that if a question resulted from a typo in the OP code those questions should be closed with "too localized" reason.  The current off-topic reason does not cover that.  Should these questions remain open now, as they do not really fall into any current closure category?  UPDATE  I marked  for diamond moderator attention to be deleted as Robert Harvey hinted below, only to get the flag declined as "declined - flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention".  Can you confidently tell me that this is a useful question that helps the goal of SE?
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What happened to the close vote option for posts that describe an error or unexpected result but don't include the relevant code or any code!? This is on of the two most popular I use.. What am I supposed to do about questions like  now!?  I just also noticed "must show minimal understanding" is missing as well. After reading over the new option again, I am supposing that the intention is to use "not likely to be helpful for future viewers" for both of these?
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was closed as "Not constructive" a little while ago by CasperOne. I'm not here to argue about the closure; in fact, I'm forced to agree that, as it stands, the question is explicitly a polling question and eligible to be closed for that reason.  I'd like to see it preserved, however; it's got a fair bit of useful in-depth information for ObjC/Cocoa developers on the "singleton" topic.* It's also (possibly more importantly) a great duplicate target -- have a look at the list of linked questions. I want to try to stave off deletion, and hopefully get it reopened.** (I did vote for reopening, but it expired.)  My thought is to edit the question itself into a "constructive" form, but after spending some time pondering how to do so, I'm not crazy about any of the ideas that I've come up with. Essentially they all involve reworking the question to fit the answers:   Rewrite the question so that the accepted answer fits exactly. "I've got this singleton implementation, but I really want the creation to happen earlier in my app's execution. How can I make that happen?" This is artificial and (in my opinion) doesn't make a particularly good question. Make the question still general, but more concrete and focused on the implementation give in the body. "What are the pitfalls associated with this singleton creation procedure? Are there other features that my singleton should have?" This is still skirting the border of discussion->NC, and none of the answers really respond to this exactly. Remove the implementation from the question and just ask for the "best" implementation. This obviously requires coming up with stringent criteria for "best", and, while it would preserve the relationship between the Q and A's best, might not even move it out of NC territory.   I'm looking for suggestions of ways to re-write this so that it can stick around. Alternatively, if you think I should just be advocating for a historical lock, say so.   If you think my basic premise is faulty and don't think the question should be preserved at all, I respectfully request that you just downvote me instead of answering -- I'd prefer not to turn this into an argument about the merits of the question, and I definitely don't want it to become a(nother) "deletionist"/"inclusionist" skirmish (and I am not infrequently ).    *Quite a bit of it unfortunately in comments.  **Historical locking would also be an acceptable solution to me, but it doesn't seem to fit the "controversial" criterion.
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My request is simple: Many times, there will be a question where some people feel like it should be closed. At the same time, I'll feel like it's a perfectly legit question, and it should therefore NOT be closed. Right now, I have to wait till it gets enough close votes (which it always does for some reason, as soon as 1 or 2 people vote to close, e/o else decides to vote as well) and then vote to re-open. How about, as soon as there's one vote to close, there should be an option to counter the close vote, something like "vote not to close" or whatever. This would then bring the "Vote to close" number down by one. Only when the vote to close outnumbers the vote not to close by 5, that's when a question is indeed closed. Any thoughts?
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Update: This has been implemented according to the .    OK, so  is the  time I've come across a perfectly valid bug report here on meta.SO that was closed as a duplicate, and the question it was closed as a duplicate of then deleted.  Since I don't have 10k here on MSO, I can't really tell when or why those questions were deleted, but I assume there were valid reasons for it.  However, regardless of the reasons for the deletion, having the questions that were closed as duplicates of the deleted question remain closed seems like a disservice to users.  Presumably, a duplicate of a deleted question either:   is no longer a duplicate, and should therefore be reopened; or is crap, just like the deleted question, and should therefore also be deleted.   I therefore propose that, when a question is deleted, any other questions closed as duplicates of it should be automatically flagged for reopening and/or deletion.  I'll leave the exact implementation details for the devs to decide, but one option might be to just add the dupes to both the reopen and the deletion queue, and let the reviewers in those queues decide their fate.  Or perhaps the 10k auto-flag system used e.g. for "questions closed without comment" could be adapted for this purpose too.  Edit: I like  of automatically adding dupes of deleted questions to the reopen review queue, but with the "leave closed" button replaced with "delete" / "recommend deletion" (since just leaving the question closed is not really a useful option in this situation).