It’s never nice to see a question closed, and I think that’s because closure is an inherently negative action, that in turn causes users to leave the site as they don’t expect an answer from it anymore.
SE sort of fixes this with comments asking for clarification, but oftentimes enough downvotes/VTCs are ammassed on a question anyway that before the user has time to respond, the question is closed and essentially completely ignored.
So perhaps closure shouldn’t be included at all? The only possible reasons I see for it existing are to make the question better (replaced by comments/edits), to remove off-topic questions (which should just be deleted with explanation [soft deletion, whereby it’s only visible to mods/user] or moved to a different site) and to remove duplicates, which at this point is considered separate to closure.
Closure is not a punishment. It does not mean “you are bad”. It means “your question needs attention/improvement”.
We don’t want answers to off topic or duplicate questions, no discussion responses if discussions are forbidden and no guessing answers that are invalidated later, once the question is clarified.
In theory, closure is nothing more but a more powerful request for clarification. It should not be about removal, but about friendly asking the user to improve their question, so that they can get answers
I think the real problem is not with closure in general. It’s with the design of any closure system. Having a huge banner with the word “closed” is not friendly. It may be appropriate for experienced users, however new users will be discouraged.
What needs to be done, is to show the user: Hey, we have found these issues with your question, and they make it technically impossible to answer your question, even if we wanted to try it. Please fix them and we’ll be able to help you.
Important part of that is, that questions can be reopened as easy (or even easier) as they can be closed.
The current state of closing questions, however, is that they’re essentially neglected - if this was implemented, we would need to rectify that issue, with a queue similar to review queues. Likely the solution would be beyond MVP, though.
I think for now a list with questions that have reopen votes (together with maybe a check box-thing showing you whether you have completed it) would be fine.
Another possibility is that while “on hold” (or “under discussion”, or whatever else we end up calling that intermediate status), any substantial edit by the original poster will cause the question to be reopened automatically. To prevent abuse, repeated closure of the same question should disable that feature, as should an existing negative question record.
In other words, reopen on edit would be a privilege that you get by default, but lose through consistent bad behaviour (but regain by positive behaviour).
Again, the problem with this is that questions which don’t receive a re-open vote will never be thought of again, and those users will feel ignored; because they are ignored. If it’s meant to improve their question, there should be some interaction on the question - and yes, a lot of the time this is the fault of the user - but just closing it and leaving it as somebody else’s problem is insufficient. If we truly want to improve questions that aren’t completely off-topic or marked for deletion, they need to be dealt with in a separate queue.
This may be something we consider late, when we have much low-quality content. Something like a mandatory sandbox for new and bad-record askers, where a question needs approval by community members before being published. However it is IMO definitely not MVP.
Another idea: What about separating between three close “types”:
Duplicate: This question has been answered already. Links to an answer, that one might be later inlined.
Off Topic: This question does not at all relate to the topic of this site. It is unsalvageable and needs to be deleted or migrated. (exceptions may apply, such as e.g. historical locks)
Needs Your Attention: This question has problems that make it impossible to answer, right now. It needs to be edited by the author in order to make it answerable. (Show a list of problems closers have identified)
Those sound sufficiently non-hostile and cover most options. I’d like to propose an Other but other than that I’d be willing to add this to wiki and request closure.
“Other” would be a sub type of either Off Topic of Needs Your Attention. (off topic for other reason/suitable for other site; needs your attention for other reason).
I would delay writing this into the wiki, until other users had a chance to see this (at least 24h).
This thread has been quiet for a while, so I’d like to propose MVP functionality (based mainly on this answer and this addition):
Some questions cannot or should not be answered as written, so we need a mechanism to put them on hold. (Called “closed” here but not necessarily in the UI.)
Closed questions may be edited into something answerable. Questions may be closed by mistake. So we need a way to reopen questions.
There’s no way to salvage a question or to learn how to write better questions if you don’t know why your question was rejected. Therefore closing a question must state a reason which is visible to everyone.
We will provide initial close reasons, including “duplicate of (link)”, “completely off-topic”, and “other” (write-in). (Not MVP: Sites can customize the built-in reasons.)
Users with trust level X (need to resolve trust levels) can close or reopen questions. (Yes for MVP I’m proposing unilateral actions, like mods, until we work out voting. If we do that and it’s easy we can update this point.)
Closed questions display one of the following messages, depending on close reason:
Duplicate: This question has been answered already; see (link(s)).
Needs your attention: We aren’t able to answer this question in its current form. It requires further information from the author. (This is the default message if one of the others does not apply.)
Off topic: This question does not relate to the topic of this site, cannot be made to fit, and should be removed.
“Completely off-topic” is for things like jQuery questions on the cooking site, not for the kinds of things SE sites write custom off-topic reasons for. I’m reluctant to include it out of concern that it’ll be misused, but we need some way to distinguish “please fix this” and “no this really isn’t going to work here at all”.
I am not sure, whether its is MVP, but I think there should be subreasons also for off-topic questions. This is good for reasons that make a question off topic, but that aren’t obvious.
For example something like the ban on site specific questions on Meta.SE, or Stack Overflow’s ban on resource requests.
These questions often cannot be made on-topic (or only with much effort and re-writing).
Off-topic subreasons, or for that matter other site-customized reasons, probably wouldn’t be MVP, since the basic functionality is satisfied by having a way to type a custom reason.