Almost certainly not MVP, and it might have already been discussed, but I haven’t seen it - could the text that appears on a closed question be set by the community? I’m thinking something like tag wikis in SO, but obviously with a very high threshold for approvals.
On SO the messaging shown to users who’d had a question closed, especially as off-topic, was confusing and misleading for a very long time, and although the recent changes improved it a little, I’m sure there’s still room for improvement. I saw lots of meta posts with experienced users bemoaning the text, but (AFAIK) powerless to change it.
Is this something we could build in to the privileges model? As I say, it would obviously need an almost-impossibly high threshold to change it, to avoid the text changing too regularly, which would be more confusing, but I feel like the community being able to directly influence that text would be a Good Thing. It might also aid localisation.
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Well, the way it works on SE is that any two diamond mods can change the text for off-topic close reasons. You can get the attention of two mods off any half-way reasonable meta post. The problem was mostly that it was hard to come up with good replacements that everyone was extremely confident in. Wordsmithing at that level is not trivial, especially when you need to manage competing visions for site direction.
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Ah, I wasn’t aware that it was editable by 2 mods. I get that the wording is the difficult bit though, and maybe there’s just no good wording that’s clear enough and concise enough for everyone.
SE has limits (both for the number of custom close reasons and the length of a close reason message) that don’t really feel justified. Sometimes this has meant one close reason has had to cover two or more sub-reasons, making it harder to write a good message. If there was more flexibility then it will become easier to write the messages.
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