I know it's tough to change a cemented opinion, but for what it's worth, I'm sorry your experience with SE sites is predominantly closed questions. I'm going to toss some things out and if you're not interested in hearing more, just delete this e-mail. Many of the questions people have about our sites are answerable by reading <site>/about or <site>/faq, both of which have gotten some overhaul in the style and layout departments which help to make the read enjoyable. I know that asking someone who's already disinterested to read a bunch of webpages is pretty silly, so I'll try to distill some of the things I've learned as I transitioned from a user to an employee.
* Closed != Deleted -- Questions that are "closed" are still visible to the public because they still have a chance at being useful to the community. We're pondering making changes to the verbiage to make it sound less fatalistic/final. The fact of the matter is, if the person asking cleans up the question and narrows it to the topic, it might get answered. Google does not index deleted questions, and you need to have a very high rep (I think 10,000?) before you can get access to deleted questions. Deletes are usually for straight up useless content (spam, questions intended to troll, etc.) * It hurts to have people close your questions. I know, because many of the questions I ask *still* get closed. I've gotten better at narrowing my queries before asking but it happens, and I'm even a moderator on SF. The hardest part, for me, was realizing that it was not vindictive or a personal attack against me or my knowledge (or lack thereof) but instead it was a method of trying to protect the quality of the site in general. * Stack Exchange is interested in one thing -- getting canonical answers to questions. If you're hitting a lot of "Closed as Off Topic"-specific questions it's because the question, as it currently exists, does nothing to improve the quality of knowledge on that site. If it doesn't fit any Stack Exchange site topics, well, we do have competitors where you could likely get answers. Experts Exchange, Quora, Yahoo Answers, there's lots of places that might be an acceptable alternative. All things being equal I'd love that question to be at SE, but if there isn't a site yet for that particular topic it's a missed opportunity for us. * There isn't an evil Stack Exchange overlord that viciously polices the sites -- the moderators are elected by the community, and nine times out of ten the questions are closed by regular community members after there's been multiple "votes to close." The people with diamonds on their name are site moderators who have special powers, you'll see a lot of closed questions don't have moderators voting on the close. We do have a community growth team who sometimes assists in moderator disputes, but we let the community handle most of the policing. We're there to keep the lights on and make the bits available, the community is the purview of the general public. At any rate, I'm willing to discuss any questions about SE more in-depth, just drop me an e-mail at [email protected]. Pete On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 6:04 PM, Corey Quinn <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Apr 9, 2013, at 1:48 PM, Craig Constantine <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > Is everyone aware of this? > > > > http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/52519/network-engineering > > > This email has been closed as "Off Topic." ;-) > > -- Corey, who despises Stack Exchange's google bombing of the same > question I'm trying to find an answer to with "thread closed as off topic" > answers, and hence pointedly avoids the site as a direct result... > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ >
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