by zahlman | 2025-05-16 16:31:49+00:00
> Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify.

There's another common misconception here - one which I held myself for years, and one which the community expressed for years in poorly-conceived close reasons that eventually got fixed. Or you could say: over time, we realized that something didn't work right for the purpose.

As you say, you can't easily evaluate or quantify that research simply by looking at the question. But that's exactly why it doesn't actually matter: because it isn't seen in a properly written question.

The purpose of the research is not to earn the right to ask a question. The purpose, rather, is to optimize the question for the format. If the question meets standards, it meets standards; doing the research is a means to that end, and it's only "expected" because it's usually necessary.

So, for example, if your code doesn't work, you're expected to do your own debugging first, until you find the part that actually causes a problem that you don't know how to fix. And then you're expected to not talk about that debugging process, and not show irrelevant detail from your code. Instead, isolate non-working code as best you can manage into a MCVE, SSCCE or whatever else you like to call it (our documentation includes advice: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), and talk about the example, directly.

>Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate... has been both frustrating and disheartening

Why? Someone just directly pointed you at an already existing answer. You got helped even faster than if someone had to write that answer from scratch. Which is a big part of the point.

Yes, that does mean that you need to apply an explanation of the same problem from an abstracted context, to your specific need. But that was supposed to be part of the expectation anyway. Because we aren't interested in the problem that motivated you to ask - you are not required to have actually had a problem at all, in fact. We're interested in having a question whose answer can help everyone in a similar situation.

But we don't provide a discussion forum, help desk, or debugging service.

> (with seemingly little recourse)

As it happens, I once asked a question that was closed as a duplicate. Here's the advice I'm still shown if I go back and look, in the blue banner at the top:

> This question already has an answer here: (link to the other question)

> Your post has been associated with a similar question. If that question doesn’t answer your issue, edit your question to highlight the difference between the associated question and yours. If edited, your question will be reviewed and might be reopened.

"Edit your question" is linked to https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21788/how-does-edit... .

> Find out more about duplicates and why your question has been closed.

Links:

https://stackoverflow.com/help/duplicates https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions

Note that even the moderators don't get to control this form message - they can at most petition the company staff for a change. The "closed-questions" link tells me about the close reasons in a fair amount of detail, and eventually links to "What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How can I reopen it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/help/reopen-questions), which also mentions the option of taking the matter to the meta site.

If I were to edit the question, the form now has a checkbox to "Submit for review", with additional popup help including a link to https://stackoverflow.com/help/review-reopen . As described in the above documentation links, the question would be put in a review queue, giving it more attention for those who can cast reopen votes.

(The reveal: actually, I closed it myself, using my gold-badge privileges - either I eventually found what I couldn't before asking, or someone pointed it out to me in a chatroom or something. The title for the Q&A I wanted was reasonable, but very different from the title I came up with. So now it's easier to find.)