How to avoid closing a question that gets more than 5k views!

Question

This question here has been asked on May 27th, 2013 and closed the same day for the reason »This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; ...«

Today we have to realise that this question has got more than 5.000 views!

How can we avoid in future to make tex.sx look ridiculous, because questions that draw a huge interest have been closed?

I am well aware that the views are a result of the headline of the question. But however, people come and find a closed question to an issue they experience themselves! We have discussed a grace period here: Should we have a Grace period to avoid premature Voting to Close and Reopening Cycle

Answer 1

As mentioned in a comment, a high number of views does not in itself mean that the question is a good one for the site. For example, a 'provocative' title may attract a lot of hits while meaning that the question does not fit the Q&A format or indeed be really about TeX at all. Views of questions come primarily from people searching for text, probably in the case in point the error message ! I can't find file `ecrm1000'. or some variant of that. That does not mean that the question or answers were helpful to the viewer: that is what votes are there to show (of course, only a subset of viewers will vote).

Questions can get closed while still being useful, and the correct thing to do there is to make the argument for reopening. That might involved editing the question to clarify how it is useful to others and so on. Thus the issue to decide on is whether that applies here.

Reading over the text of the question linked here, it's clear that the issue the user has is not a general one as such but a problem with multiple TeX systems being installed. Beyond a rather general 'sort out your TeX system(s) so that each one is using its own files' there is not an answer we can give here. (Indeed, it's arguable that this is an OS issue as much as a TeX one.) That makes this particular question (historically) 'too localized' or nowadays probably 'off topic' (a configuration issue on an isolated system).

Of course, one might wonder if the error message suggests there is a general question to be answered. There almost certainly is, and we might arrange to have such a question on the site (if we do not already): someone could post a well-formed question and an answer at the same time. However, that is not the same as saying this question should be reopened: as I say, while the error appears general it's quite clear that the issue in this case was not. (One could argue that we could remove the edit parts from the linked question to make it general and simply ignore the fact that the OP had TL2012 around at all. To me that seems to be taking an edit too far: the questioner wasn't really trying to get 'managed' TL working at all.)

Fundamentally, as a Q&A site the idea is that (open) questions should have some value beyond just the person posting them. That's why we tend to try to 'clear up' things like system misconfiguration, typos, misunderstandings and the like in comments. These cases don't make good general questions so are likely to be closed but at the same time we can try to help the person who asked.