Custom Close Reasons for The Workplace

Question

I am delaying moving forward with this until we resolve the problematic parts as brought up by several users including Chad, jcmeloni, and mxyzplk. It isn't going away, but we want to make sure that we are all on the same page about what questions we want to have custom close reasons for, and that we agree as a community that we aren't tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

The Background

All sites on the SE network have the following fixed close reasons:

• Duplicate
• Unclear What You're Asking
• Too Broad
• Primarily Opinion-Based

In addition to the four default reasons, each site is given 3 custom off-topic reasons they can use to close questions. Currently we have two:

Questions seeking advice on what job to take, what skills to learn, etc. are off-topic as the answers are rarely useful to anyone else.

Questions seeking legal advice are off-topic as they require answers by legal professionals. See: What is asking for legal advice?

There have been recent meta requests for an additional two more:

Questions about how to handle specific interpersonal conflicts are not practical answerable questions. Interpersonal problems should be brought up with your manager or HR department who can actually do something about the person(s) causing them.

^{Discussion here}

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about regulations or agreements that are company-specific and don't have universally applicable answers.

^{Discussion here}

In addition, anyone with the close privilege can write in a custom close reason that is displayed as a comment and closes the question as off-topic.

The Problem

We have 4 potential custom close reasons, but only 3 custom close reason slots. You don't need to ask a question on math.se to figure out that there's a slight logistical problem there.

Since April 1st, the Stack Exchange Data Explorer has allowed us to create queries looking at close reason. Unfortunately, it doesn't distinguish custom close vote reasons for non-SO sites at the moment, which means we can't get an easy breakdown of which custom close reasons (or write-in reasons) we use the most to get a better grasp of what we are best to get rid of.

The Research

Since there were only 262 questions closed as off-topic according to the above query, I just went through the titles and make generous judgments of which ones I thought were likely closed as asking for legal guidance. This is not a very scientific approach (more like an educated guess), but it should give us a decent enough ballpark figure.

Of the 262 questions that were closed as off-topic, by my (admittedly simple) count, 52 of them were close as legal advice. That is less than 20%. That means custom reasons and the 'what should I do?' type questions take up 80% of our off-topic close votes. And most of those are probably 'what should I do?' questions (which becomes clear if you look at the titles from the query I linked above).

What Should We Do?

I propose the following three custom close reasons:

---

This reason is disputed, please continue the discussion here

Questions about how to handle specific interpersonal conflicts are not practical answerable questions. Interpersonal problems should be brought up with your manager or HR department who can actually do something about the person(s) causing them.

This would be used for questions along the lines of:

1. How do I deal with the fact that I'm awesome and everyone around me sucks?
2. How can I convince X to do Y?

Desired result: have the user edit the question to focus on a solvable problem, rather than the person causing it.

---

Questions seeking advice on company-specific regulations, agreements, or policies should be directed to your manager or HR department. Questions that address only a specific company or position are of limited use to future visitors.

This would be used for questions along the lines of:

• If I work on the weekend, can I get time off during the week in exchange?
• How many days of paid leave can I carry over until the next year?
• What travel expenses can I receive compensation for? (etc.)

"What job should I take?" and legal advice questions would have their reasons combined:

Questions asking for advice on what to do are not practical answerable questions (e.g. "what job should I take?", "what skills should I learn?" or "is it legal?"). Questions should get answers explaining why and how to make a decision, not advice on what to do.

This would be used for the same types of questions that we use the existing two reasons for.

Discussion

If there are no objections, I would like to implement this at the end of this week. If you have questions, comments, concerns, or potential improvements to the reasons I have provided, please share them here with a comment or answer.

For reference, the character limit for custom close reasons is 400 characters (the last reason I listed above is at exactly 400).

Answer 1

We can combine the legal and company-specific reasons thus:

Questions seeking advice on company-specific regulations, agreements, or policies should be directed to your manager or HR department. Questions that address only a specific company or position are of limited use to future visitors. Questions seeking legal advice should be directed to legal professionals; see: What is asking for legal advice?

Answer 2

Questions asking for advice on what to do are not practical answerable questions (e.g. "what job should I take?", "what skills should I learn?" or "is it legal?"). Questions should get answers explaining why and how to make a decision, not advice on what to do.

I am in support of this being added as an off-topic close reason. I think it needs to be modified to specifically bar asking "What should I do?" rather than "How can I accomplish X" which are both what should I do questions but the former is answerable and on topic(assuming X is a workplace navigation problem).

Questions asking for general advice on what to do are not practical answerable questions. Questions should seek answers explaining how to make a decision, or should include a specific goal you wish to achieve.

The off topic questions about skills to learn and jobs to take should be left in the current close reason as it is being used appropriately.

Answer 3

Having reviewed the linked question about the interpersonal reason (and noting its upvotes), I propose a variant on that version:

Questions about how to handle interpersonal conflicts are not practical answerable questions. Interpersonal problems should be brought up with your manager or HR department. Please ask questions about solving a practical problem rather than the person causing the problem.

Answer 4

Questions about how to handle specific interpersonal conflicts are not practical answerable questions. Interpersonal problems should be brought up with your manager or HR department who can actually do something about the person(s) causing them.

Could we reword this to something like:

Questions about solving interpersonal conflicts should be clear as to exactly what the problem is and what you hope to achieve as a goal. Posts without a clear goal are not practical answerable questions. Please see Good Subjective, Bad Subjective for guidance on how to reword this post to make it more clear, constructive, fair, and/or impartial.

Answer 5

Questions about how to handle specific interpersonal conflicts are not practical answerable questions. Interpersonal problems should be brought up with your manager or HR department who can actually do something about the person(s) causing them.

I am against the implementation of this close reason.

I think this close reason will shut down a lot more questions than the intended SPECIFIC questions. I can see this close reason being used far more broadly than intended. We already have issues with more difficult, but answerable and on topic questions, being closed for primarily opinion based.

I would be in support of a close reason that was specific to the convincing another person to do something. These questions are rarely savable with out a heroic rewrite of the question.