Entering edit mode
11.4 years ago
Istvan Albert
101k
We have a disagreement with respect of the option of "post closing" and we need community input.
This is a feature that allows moderators to mark a post as closed. The primary effect of closing a post is that no answers may be added to the post anymore. The post would need to be re-opened to become an "answerable" question.
Post closing has been a feature of Biostar for over 3 years but has been disabled in the past two months. A long discussion of the issues can be found at Suggesting the removal of post closing
- Removal of this feature has been initiated by Istvan Albert The rationale was that the act of post closing is believed to be unhelpful over long term, sends an overly heavy handed message and discourages and drives away new users and beginners. The vast majority of post don't get improved after closing them. This group believes that other means should be used to improve the post, commenting and requesting the user to expand the question. If that does not happen in a certain amount of time then the post should be deleted.
- Keeping the feature has been strongly supported by Michael Dondrup, Neilfws and lh3 . The argument for post closing is summarized here C: Suggesting the removal of post closing In a nuthsell it is believed to be an essential ingredient for creating high quality content and that existing sites such as StackOverflow that have this feature are the evidence that demonstrate the utility and long term benefits of this feature.
Vote for your preferred option below by upvoting the answer that you agree with.
Should moderators have the option of closing posts?
I should add two things. Firstly, although we do not have post closure, we have post deletion. With post closure, we can still add comments, but with post deletion, the questioners have little chance to appeal. Giovanni M Dall'Olio Suggesting The Removal Of Post Closing (only moderators can see). I think these questions should be closed, not deleted.
Secondly, I think the problem with post closure/deletion is because we have too many moderators. SO is such a huge site and only has 16 moderators. "Mathematics" SE has 8. "Programmers" and many other SE have no more than 5 moderators. In contrast, we have 68 moderators! Each moderator has his/her own standard. I know they all well behave, but when we delete/close questions based on the union of 68 individual standards, post deletion/closure will look very aggressive to end users. We cannot simply conclude a feature is useless because other parts are broken.
EDIT: just notice Istvan's comment that we should not discuss anything during voting. He has a good point, but as one of the three listed advocates of post closure, I think I have right to give my arguments.
EDIT2: response to Giovanni (as I cannot add new comments in a poll): thanks a lot for correcting me. Then what lacks in biostar, as Michael said, is to vote to close/reopen. It is anyway dangerous for a single moderator to close/delete a post. Perhaps before it is implemented, the moderator can just leave "close" in the comment?
one thing I did not immediately realize is that this will give me extra reputation just by having the options there - I will subtract that manually from the database.
It's true that the other SE websites have few moderators. However, all the users that have more than 10,000 points have access to the same tools as any other moderator. See http://stackoverflow.com/privileges
the irony of this post is that, once this Poll will be finished, you will have to close it ;-)