2

... so we don't wind up with so many that have to be closed?

I don't have any good suggestions, alas.

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    Question Writer Boot Camp... – Joe Strazzere Oct 18 '16 at 23:28
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    Certification Exams? – Joe Strazzere Oct 18 '16 at 23:28
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    Sorry, I got nothin. Other than just simply not closing so many questions, I don't see a solution. – Joe Strazzere Oct 18 '16 at 23:29
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    I fairly heavily edit things sometimes. Often those of us regulars can do well in pulling out what the OP is really asking out of vague or unclear questions. It takes effort though. How to get people to write good posts from the start? shrug. no idea :P – enderland Oct 19 '16 at 0:18
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    And some questions will just be off topic, no matter what, and our responsibility as a community is to help people realize that. That's not a bad thing. Blatantly off topic questions fall into a different category than some of them though, which can be edited to varying levels to make them more on topic. – enderland Oct 19 '16 at 0:19
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    Close more quickly so we can actually improve the question or clarify the problem before foolishly quick answers prevent any reasonable improvement or, worse, push something in to HNQ? ... – Lilienthal Mod Oct 19 '16 at 13:49
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    I think we've tried pretty much everything except prayer – Kilisi Mod Oct 21 '16 at 9:40
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    Seriously though. At this point, we have to be careful that we do not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Sometimes "good enough" actually is. – Old_Lamplighter Oct 21 '16 at 13:09
  • @RichardU - ugh, there goes the travel budget! – Wesley Long Oct 26 '16 at 16:42
  • I tend to be lenient with new users except when: 1. The description is a huge wall of text. 2. The so-called question is just a commentary with nothing close to a question. 3. The description is nothing but a big rant or a philosophical dissertation on how the world is supposed to work. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive. – Masked Man Dec 25 '16 at 6:56
1

Only thing I can think of is we wait longer.

Comment on the question, dont downvote, dont vtc for the first 24 hours this question is online.

I mean most questions that are on hold are rightly so, sometimes I feel we closed something way to fast makeing it easy for the OP to give up.

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    The more answers a problematic question has, the harder it usually is to fix it with an edit (because edits shouldn't invalidate existing upvoted answers). So especially if a question is unclear, or more generally if it needs an edit before it can reasonably be answered, put it on hold ASAP so people stop answering based on guesses that might turn out to be wrong. – Monica Cellio Nov 23 '16 at 18:06
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    Would it help if the close texts said more explicitly "Please edit the question into a form that fits here -- provide the missing detail or trim out irrelevant detail, make clear what question you are really asking (after reviewing what kinds of questions work here and which don't), etc"? The other alternative is to arbitrarily delay CTC by first posting a comment and having it up voted, but I'm not sure that's strong enough. Unfortunately people don't understand the implications of hold, and we really can't expect them to until they have more experience – keshlam Nov 23 '16 at 19:24
  • @MonicaCellio Well thats true, but I feel like that's an different problem. – Raoul Mensink Nov 24 '16 at 13:15
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We could ask the SE people to put some validation in the form to filter spelling and simple grammar issues with a nice message 'Please correct your kindergarten spelling errors and resubmit.'

But the actual question idea itself would be difficult to validate automatically. Kudo's to us humans beating the machines once again.

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