Is there need for a third custom off-topic close reason?

Question

Today, we retired the what have you tried? custom off-topic close reason, as per consensus on this Meta question.

That leaves us with the following custom off-topic reasons:

• This appears to be a tech support question about fixing technology to work as advertised. Please edit the question so that it pertains to using technology to solve a design problem. You may want to check if it hasn't already been asked in Super User. In many cases, contacting the manufacturer is the quickest option.

• Please review our font-identification, critique requests, or style-identification requirements and provide the missing information so that your question is both answerable and useful to others.

Every Stack has access to three custom off-topic close reasons. Retiring one means we have space for a new one. Is there any need for one? If yes, what should it be?

Please also refer to old discussions about this topic:

• What are our custom "Off-Topic" reasons?
• Optimising the second and third custom close reasons
• How effective are our custom off-topic close reasons?

Answer 1

There's so much talk these days of what's on topic, and what's off topic.

While it would be nice to tell lazy people to go away, that's what we're here for. That's what I'm here for anyways.

We ALL are human can get burned out. Take a week, take two, take a month even. But to me a lot of the talk is more an issue of people getting question fatigue.

I've learned from CAI, Vincent, Yisela, Acekin, Scott, Benteh, user568458, Cockypop, Darth and countless others on here. I've learned because they offered their time to help someone and even if that doesn't come across from the person who originally asked I sure appreciate it. What even some of us can do in a few seconds others might take minutes and others might be completely clueless on.

I really would like to implore people to not close everything.

I don't think we need a third close reason right now. I don't see anything that's not covered by an existing one that is also problematic.

Answer 2

I have now seen quite a debate over what close reasons should cover what and what we want to communicate to the user. But all the questions in question have one thing in common:

they are lazy

There I said it. We can't beat around the bush with "too broad" or "too tool-specific". Not even "what have you tried". We cannot explain to lazy people how not to be lazy. No other stack site allows such lazy questions as we do. And it's all for growing a user-base. But what kind of base is that growing? It shoos away the professionals and invites in the tut-plz people. Leaving the question page like this:

Lazy questions need to go or the users will. I'd rather answer one good one per week than look at another 100 bad ones. And if that means the close reason is just two words, so be it. "too lazy"

Answer 3

As mentioned in the discussion that freed this slot, I think it may be worthwhile to have a custom close reason for big-tutorial-on-demand questions. While they are covered by too broad, a custom close reason may provide better guidance to the asker without the close voters having to type custom comments each time.

Thinking about this (and looking at recent close votes), I noticed that the problem underlying these questions is somewhat similar to what-software-was-used-for-this questions (which are almost always unanswerable): The asker assumes that things are much more easy than they actually are and that there is some magic button to achieve this.

To kill these two birds with one stone, I propose:

This question cannot be reasonably answered as there are too many possible ways, programs or required steps to achieve the result in question. Please narrow down your question by focussing on a single problem or specifying constraints.

If somebody knows a good question, blog post or similar that summarises the underlying issue (lay people consider graphic design to be less difficult than it actually is), it might be a good resource to link in that close reason.

Note that I would not consider the proposed close reason to be high priority as too broad already covers it quite well and gives adequate guidance, but instead of having a free slot, we might as well have this.

Answer 4

I have a problem with the "exact duplicate" response, when it's not exact. Exact implies that the user has already asked that question and is reposting it.

It should be changed to "too similar." That says that similar questions and answers can be easily found.

Another suggestion; maybe at the initial question, the phrase, "have you searched existing answers?" could be more prominent. With a highlighted search box right there. I think that would help newbies understand that they should search first.