【闽南日报】龙文： 开发手机APP 河长治水有...

Question

I've noticed that there is a group of about 20 people (me included) who are constantly shutting down questions that a legitamate person who might not know better are trying to get help, but are instead shut down and closed out of oblivion. So, now: even if I wanted to help them, I have no course of action to do so because a bunch of other people deemed this person is not allowed to have help on-site...

This leads me to a bunch of meta-discussions on this:

• Why are people on StackOverflow so incredibly disrespectful?
• Can we be nicer to new users?

Yes, it is true that Gaming.SE is based on StackOverflow, but we need to remember that developers are not the only ones who play video games. And, you guessed it: The general public are not very good at posting excellent questions that are up to our VERY HIGH standards.

Furthermore, sometimes individualized help might help someone else; if we have multiple questions, let's taking this recent path-of-exile example... If we have more help, maybe one of the assistances that was given could be relevant to someone else. Everything is not perfect, and everything is not deterministic, and someone researching the topic might come across multiple questions and eventually piece something together or try them all before going "welp, time to ask for help because everything I've tried doesn't work".

If a question doesn't answer someone elses' problem, there's always "make a new question and reference the old one". Taking from a developer analogy, why does this exist?

Of course, this wouldn't apply to questions where all the instances are effectively duplicates of the exact same problem as each other... Like the unbalanced brackets problem where there are a lot... And even then, the mass of that is why we started creating general Q&A like Is there a list of error codes for Minecraft?, which should hopefully cover 99% (and if it doesn't, we should add to it) of the cases, and we can now focus on more novel things like minecraft-mods.

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Here's another example of the misuse of closing; for example: What is the rising lava command? (better read as "How do I make a 'lava table' using commands?"), which is essentially: How do I make a button? (in basic HTML/CSS/Javascript).

These two questions has a little body, and even the Javascript one has an attempt at it... But yet, they're both closed and deemed as low quality (and by me even in one of them!).

I'm sure, if someone puts a bit of elbow grease, it would be possible to create a lava table using commands with a little bit of thinking (and it is; just /clone or /fill a giant cuboid of lava into whatever arena you're trying to fill).

Answer 1

It is not accurate to conclude from those questions that this site is hostile to "individualized" or "difficult" questions, because those questions have problems beyond that.

I do not have much familiarity with Path of Exile, but the question looks very open-ended ("how can I die less?") and the question links to a page with a lot of very detailed information about the build, while including insufficient relevant information in the question itself. It seems unlikely to me that "Cast While Channeling Arc (CWC) Inquisitor" is sufficient build information to determine what the problem is. So, the question should be edited to include all of the relevant information from the linked page that would be needed to determine what the problem is. However, if all of the information in the linked page is potentially relevant, that creates its own problems, because it's just an excessive amount of information to expect an answerer to analyze. To me, that's analogous to a Stack Overflow question with a large amount of code that asks "why isn't it working?" which is also not accepted there.

For the Minecraft "rising lava" question, my interpretation of what that question is asking for is different from yours, which in my mind immediately justifies closing the question with the "needs details or clarity" reason. The asker needs to edit the question to more clearly describe what they want to accomplish.

As a general note, both of the questions are referenced are closed with the "needs details or clarity" reason. This doesn't mean "we don't like you, go away," it means "Add details and clarify the problem being solved. This will help others answer the question. You can edit the question." This isn't "oblivion," it's a prompt to improve the question. If the user chooses not to make the basic improvements requested, then it is reasonable for the question to stay closed.