We all come through Google to questions like "Which is better Matlab or OpenCV?" or "What are the best resources for learning ?"  These questions tend to be closed, sometimes marked for deletion, be primary opinion based, have hundreds of upvotes, and be really useful.  It would be good if these were always available, perhaps though automatic migration to another StackExchange instead of deletion.  While the knowledge is not in the StackOverflow form, it is knowledge none the less.  Is there any consistent attempt to save this knowledge?
11386
Historical locks are sometimes applied to questions.   What is a historical lock? What is the purpose of a historical lock? How are questions affected by historical locking? When is it appropriate to lock a question for historical reasons?  When is it not appropriate? How do I request a historical lock for a question? What should I do if I notice a serious problem with a historically-locked question or one of its answers?
90989
What should we do with Stack Overflow-specific questions on Meta Stack Exchange?  .  , as long as it meets some (underspecified) conditions.  Whose advice should we follow?  If it's Tim's advice, what exactly are the conditions for flagging (preferably in quantifiable terms - not sure what "undecided" means)?  If we shouldn't flag them, or just some of them, what should we do with them then (or the rest of them)?  Should we close (and eventually delete) them all?  Note - by "flag", I'm exclusively referring to flagging for migration.  My opinions:   In the case of completed requests, isn't it worth keeping them around for the sake of reference? And if we're going to keep them around, shouldn't it be on the correct site? In the case of uncompleted requests, if we close and/or delete these, why do so, just to have them show up on Meta Stack Overflow some point down the line (minus all the discussion and votes should approval / disapproval)? And is there really such a big difference between something posted on 15 April (pre-split) versus something posted on 20 April (post-split)? Why treat them so differently? Isn't that just us being blinded by the rules? Or is migrating them really such a massive deal?
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Just curious. Generally when I see a closed or migrated question, the reasoning seems sound. This one caught my eye, however, and made me wonder if I've been wrong in my assumptions.    What were the criteria here for closing the question as "Off-Topic", as opposed to migrating to SF? Seemed a valid question to me, yet it was closed just a day after it was asked. Is the lack of immediate answers the problem?  Not trying to challenge the decision - as I said, just curious :-)
55514
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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For most cases the answer is either Stack Overflow or Cross Validated. But for my current , neither of them seem suitable. Is SU the right place? I also see MATLAB in Area 51, but I'm not sure if that site is actually for asking questions, or discussing the proposal itself.  So I would appreciate any help on where to ask such a specific question.
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I understand the desire to keep a closed question around for Google or SO Search purposes, or when a question is a dupe, or has been moved to "(sister site)" and therefore I don't want the to be deleted.  However as a user of the site, logged in, looking to help someone out (or just gain some rep) answering questions, the [Closed] questions just become noise.     Would you consider an option (for logged in users) to not show Closed questions,   unless running a search?   e.g. if I search for "IE getElementById error" then please show the closed questions as they may be helpful.  However when just going to the Questions page... p2, p3, p4, p5 etc. I'd rather not see those questions as typically they are the "Spam, Not a real question, or Belongs on Sister site" questions... all of which I'm not interested in.  Alternatively any chance they could be styled similar to "ignored tag" questions where they are almost faded out?
51818
Let's say I'm a good Stack Overflow citizen: I have a question, I search on SO and on google to see if someone's asked the same thing, and I can't find anything that shows up, so I go ahead and post a well-written question on SO. Then later it gets closed, because it's a duplicate question for something that I wasn't able to find on my initial search. Great, the system worked.  Is there ever a case where I should delete the question I posted? Why or why not? Do duplicate questions cause much resource bloat for the site?
93084
Users have the ability to self-delete their questions, as long as no upvoted answer exists. There are two major patterns of misuse of the ability to delete your own questions:   Deleting a question immediately after it was answered, the answer has not enough time to receive an upvote and prevent deletion. Deleting closed or heavily downvoted questions and reasking them mostly unchanged.   These patterns are harmful to the community as they can delete useful content or hide that a user is reasking a bad question multiple times. The only mechanisms against these currently are the automatic question ban and manual intervention of users that observe these patterns.  I'm proposing some new methods or adjustments of existing ones to prevent these harmful self-deletion patterns:  To prevent the immediate deletion of questions after they are answered, there are two possible solutions:   Only allow deletion after a specific delay from the creation time of the answer, so that the answer has enough time to receive some votes and the associated protection from deletion. Prohibit deletion of questions with answers of a non-negative score. This would immediately protect questions that were just answered and still allow deletion if the answer is downvoted. Could be gamed by the asker downvoting themselves, if they have the privilege.   To prevent the misuse of self-deletion to reask the same bad question I propose a new automatic community flag "Consecutive self-deleted posts", similar to the consecutive closed questions. I don't have any hard data, but I would suspect that benign self-deletion of two questions in a row is very rare, and there wouldn't be too much noise caused by this flag.
36799
I am answering questions on  - some of those answers are quite lengthy, including images and code (as are answers by others) and it would be a pity if they were just lost one day.   If the Beta site closed, I could envisage one or more of:   Moving some of the questions and answers to my own forum Moving them to the StackOverflow site (which already has a lot of questions/answers about Arduino) Move them to the , at which I am a moderator   Of course, in the case of my own answers there would be no issue of getting permission, and in the case of answers by other people this could follow discussion with the authors.  I would prefer to be able to access the markdown (question source) rather than having to redo the markdown when reposting.    So, my question is:   If a Beta site is closed down, is this after a warning period, so we have the ability to grab the markdown for answers we want to save (and any images)? Do we have the option to migrate them to other sites? (I currently don't have enough rep for that, perhaps I might have when and if the site closed). Even after the closing date, is there still a time period in which authors can migrate their questions/answers? Are some questions/answers migrated automatically (eg. if they have a good score)?   (My searches haven't revealed an exact answer to this).
7140
There are many general resource questions that ask questions such as "what is the best programming language?" or "How do I implement this commonly-confusing thing?", which get closed for being subjective or generalized.  While these are currently outside the scope of SE, many have generated .  Therefore, I suggest that instead of closing these questions, the best ones should be relocated to a new sister site like this:     assorted.stackoverflow.com (or any other prefix)   I've looked around and seen something like this suggested before, but what I found suggested things such as a compiled FAQ or separate site (which is similar, but then would be hard to search since all site questions would be merged into one long list).  Of course, I understand the implications of such a heady statement, and the effort that would be required to accomplish this must be immense.  However there are good reasons for this change:     This would provide a place to ask subjective questions, which means instead of closing questions against the community's will, misplaced questions can be migrated. This can discourage repetitious questions that continuously ask the same popular questions.  It certainly wouldn't get all of the duplicates, but it might help. This would encourage users to write new, useful questions that are inherently subjective,  but are still very helpful.   A number of technologies could accompany this that could make integration simpler:   Each site has the sub-site in the main toolbar listed between "chat" and "main/meta".  This allows for quick navigation between the sub-sites. The new sub-site could have its search results automatically included in the "main" portion of the site so that it can be seen by people posting their questions on the main page (to help avoid duplicates). Either a new rating system could be imposed which does not affect the user's rep (i.e. is local to the question only) so that the questions can be ordered by rating, or rating can be taken out altogether.  I don't recommend tying in the rating with the parent site because the sites may become indistinguishable. Allow for migration to the new sub-site.  Perhaps require less migration votes to move to this particular sub-site because A) it still pertains to the actual subject matter, and B) Migration would be more frequent to this sub-site.   Finally, if this would become a reality, Stack Exchange would likely require a change to their mission statement to include that there is a small subsection devoted to the most highly-valued subjective questions, or something along those lines.  Now, nothing ever gets done without first being discussed, so how does everybody feel about all of this?  NOTE TO DOWNVOTERS Thank you for your interest.  Downvoting does not mean that you dislike my post.  Do not downvote because the question happens to be a duplicate of a question that by all means, I would never have found without stumbling across it myself (yes, I took a good hard look before I asked this one).  Remember that downvoting is only meant to indicate a bad question or for feature requests, a poorly thought-out request.  I took a lot of time writing this request; because you do not agree with it is no cause for the (to quote another user) "Haterade".
6549
The following question was closed:    I, and others, voted to re-open the question. I also flagged the question saying:     This question was closed incorrectly by a single moderator vote. Can we get it open again please?   This flag was marked helpful but then the question was deleted by the moderator . Lasse also left the following comment:     This question, and answer, contains code copyrighted by Embarcadero. Not only will it stay closed in its current form, it will also be deleted.   I don't believe, although I could very well be wrong, that either question or answer contains code copyrighted by Embarcadero. As a licensed user of Delphi Profession, I have the source code to the Delphi libraries which is where I presume Lasse believes the source code originates. I cannot find it there.  I flagged the question again saying:     I don't believe that there is copyright violation here. Could the supposed violation be made more clear?   This flag was  with the comment:     A moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it.   Clearly one of the moderators, presumably Lasse believes that this code violates Embarcadero copyright. I would like to see the evidence for that assertion. I fully understand that I may be mistaken and that this really is a violation of Embarcadero copyright and that I simply have not found or do not have access to the copyrighted code in question.  For what it is worth, the question was later re-posted: .
53275
Having been a member of Stack Overflow for a year, I have participated in reviewing close votes and flagging questions if I found any duplicates. However, I don't understand the purpose of closing a question.  As per myself, the main purpose is keeping the site clean and make a better place.     I still see closed questions on the site that are a year old.  When will these questions be deleted?   Also, when a question/answer does get deleted, it is still visible to 10k users, even if it is deleted by the owner.   Every day I participate in reviewing close votes, but the question arises why we are preserving these questions and answers even after they are closed.
15946
Since it's currently impossible to delete a "vote to close",* when I see a poorly asked question, should I immediately vote to close, or should I comment, and give the OP a chance to improve his question?  Waiting increases the chance that I'll forget, and never vote to close, potentially leading to a cluttered site.  Voting to close immediately increases the chance that the question will be closed, and the author will be forced to re-post his (hopefully improved) question, which leads to a cluttered site. :)  *It is now possible to , but that doesn't change the fundamental nature of this question.
38997
I know C++, Python, JavaScript and Prolog.  I want to learn Java.  Will my question be deleted if I ask for recommendations on StackOverflow?  If so, is there another StackExchange site I can ask on?
113460
I've seen a lot of questions about how to handle out of date answers, but I came across a post that presents a slightly different problem.    The question was closed for being non-constructive which is perhaps a bit debatable, but let's ignore that for now.  The problem is, even though it's closed, it's still there and the answers are still available.  They appear to be valid information.  However, these answers were all supplied over three years ago!  There's no question that they are inaccurate and misleading at this point.  But what is the solution?  We can't add new answers to replace them.  Should the question itself be deleted?  Should a duplicate be posted rephrasing the question to be more appropriate?  edit  , but is another good example of this problem.  The question comes up high in Google searches, and contains woefully out of date information.
55174
Bjarne Stroustrup once mentioned in one of his bigthink interviews that one of the greatest problems most programmers have is not finding or using the right libraries.  On stackoverflow and programmers, I've observed a trend towards questions like "I want to do this, is there a [library | programming language] for that", or "I have these {n} [library | language] candidates for my project; which one would yield me the least amount of headache given these requirements".   Since questions like these aren't exactly programming questions in the sense of "this code should do this, but it does this, why?", they are often (though not always) being closed as "not constructive" because they do not have a definite answer (which is true, and according to the FAQ they would be off-topic on both stackoverflow and programmers).  Nonetheless, I think library questions are valid, and that it is helpful for any programmer to receive independent input from experienced programmers (at least it helps me a lot every time I browse through one of those closed questions, which I found through google). Does anyone agree that posting library choice questions should be explicitly allowed on either stackoverflow or programmers?
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Update: Found in the "Highest voted questions" list on the 10k tools "stats" tab today:    (question is +37 and best answer is +27)  (question is +23 and best answer is +15)   both with obvious duplicates of long standing. I've voted to  close, but I doubt it will ever happen, not am I entirely sure it would be fair at this point.  But I think is points out very clearly that we're not getting enough policing.    Original:  On any given day, I can open the 10k tools on Stack Overflow, go to the close tab, and burn through all my close votes in an hour or so (hey, I take some time to compare proposed duplicates and search out better ones myself, and try to write politely encouraging comments to users I guess may be to be new or sensitive).   And it doesn't make a dent in the supply of bad questions that need to go.  I put to you a set of linked questions:   Do we need to get more questions closed? If so, what can we do to encourage more closing? What do we need to do to maintain quality control while we do it? Are the cultural norms we bring to closing sufficiently professional? What can we do to create fewer hurt feeling even while we maintain discipline and focus on the site?   Some related questions:   Are we closing the right questions right now? Are we closing too many good questions, and if so are they getting consistently re-opened?     Many related resources:      and several other like it   and