29
'Executive summary' of the following answer:
The key aim of reading questions is to help the asker
Voting to close is thus (usually) something to do after comments or similar to improve questions have failed
Rapid closing is ideally aimed at clear cases such as questioner agreeing, spam, massively off-topic, etc.
Minimal working examples (MWEs) are a useful ...
27
There are a few things to say here. First off, the StackExchange 'back end' works in the same way for all sites, which means that 'we' (TeX-SX) have to use the structures as decided on by the 'Powers'. Occasionally that means we have some oddities. That leads to the second point: 'off topic' is (currently) intended not only to cover questions which are out-...
27
do mark the question as a duplicate. but don't remove your answer. although the answer may be essentially the same as the one for the question identified as a duplicate, someone coming to the site in the future may find this question first,
and the fact that the answer is there may save that person from an additional
step in finding an answer.
(on the ...
27
Such a feature has been discussed before on the big meta (How Do I Opt Out of Privileges?). It has been rejected, with a very simple reason: Nobody (i.e., not even the casual voters) should vote for duplicating unless they are 100% sure it is the correct action.
If you are not sure, you should simply comment, not vote to close, and see where it goes.
26
One I think uncontroversial close reason is for things which are typos or which cannot be reproduced: these are about TeX but are unlikely to help any future readers. Thus something like
This question was caused by a problem that can no longer be reproduced or
a simple typographical error. While similar questions may be on-topic
here, this one was ...
21
I just have answered Magazine template? because is not a technical question, but it is clear and specific. He do not ask how to make a magazine. He asks if there's anything out there to not make it from scratch. This might be answered narrowly with a "No, sorry", "Sure, go here and there" or "Well, more or less. Look at this and that, and so you get the ...
18
It's not a problem. If there would be upvoted answers, the question would not be unanswered and would go away from the "unanswered" list.
No need to close, what would actually prevent further, possibly even better, answers.
See on the main meta site: Would it be possible to have a “community accepted” feature?
You can show your acceptance of an answer by ...
17
As we have seen from the comments, every detail leads to another full blown discussion and I am not the TeX-SX correspondant so I'll try to be a user again.
Because there is user involvement that might lead to confrontation and since we are extremely avoiding it, I have to be very careful with the sentences I am using. Otherwise it starts to get dissected ...
15
The status-declined tag for Can we have the ability to rescind a close vote before it closes? was... rescinded. It was updated to status-planned on June 10, 2013 and subsequently implemented on July 21, 2013, turning it into status-completed.
Users are now able to "undo" their close-votes in a similar way that one can retract/modify your regular vote to a ...
14
Let's review the complete original question to see of there's any reason to close it.
Title: "Just reducing the f***ing huge space before the first line"
This is obscene language. Sean later took the time to clean it.
Question text: "Please help me to make the rest of my life better, found nothing here..."
This is not a question.
Code: was added without ...
14
In this case, the post shouldn't be closed first.
As @cfr explained in comment, the OP can have the problem and not knowing why this doesn't work for him/her.
Sometimes the error is a old TeX system and updating it to a current version is the best way to solve the problem.
Sometimes the MWE first provided by the OP didn't show the proper behavior: the OP ...
12
Some questions are straightforward duplicates and there's no point in waiting the OP to confirm it: see for example https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/149747/include-endlstlisting-inside-lstlisting-block which is a duplicate of Masking \end{lstlisting}
Other cases are not so straightforward and I endorse the idea of giving some grace time for the OP to ...
10
Based on some discussion in chat and looking at the comments on the answer by dcmst it seems clear that the question isn't a dupe but that the question also wasn't all that clear. I've therefore edited the question to try to make it clearer and also removed the duplicate mark. (I've also added a second answer, but that's a different aspect!)
10
Close as off-topic (with the motivation "the problem is due to an outdated package or distribution) is the current policy, mostly for lack of better reasons.
On the other hand, the net is full of outdated examples and templates (even in the LaTeX related Wikibooks pages); it would be impossible for us to cope with all of them, maintaining information ...
10
I'm against such a rule, because it doesn't bring anything significantly positive, at least not on TeX.SX.
In many cases the question is resolved in comment, as was pointed out by Joseph, and OP is completely aware that the question is getting closed as dupe or OT, understanding the reasons. In other cases, the question is simply off-topic with now doubt ...
9
Option 1
From the perspective of the community, the Stack Exchange system (or interface) allows for correcting this:
Cast enough re-open votes to remove any closure statements from the post.
Re-cast close-votes using the appropriate duplicate.
I would further suggest that the process could be sped up when collaborating with the folks in chat. There are ...
9
This is a common concern with the community: Why are certain questions closed as duplicates of others when they ask for different things. It's simple: The answer to both questions lead to the same answer.
But wait... the question is closed as a duplicate of another question, which is completely wrong when the questions don't ask for the same thing. Right? ...
7
This appears to be normal procedure and no special powers were needed in this case. https://tex.stackexchange.com/help/duplicates says
The original question generally must have an answer; questions may only be marked as duplicates of unanswered questions on meta sites, when the questions share the same author, or when closed by a moderator.
Presumably ...
7
The reasons you note that is absent in the choices for voting to close a question as off-topic stems from the original close-voter using the "Other (add a comment explaining what is wrong)" choice and writing an appropriate comment.
You'll note that there is no mention within the closure notification added to a question other than it's off-topic. Consider ...
6
Off-topic questions with zero votes here can be deleted. If not, they may be deleted automatically based on the following conditions:
The system will automatically delete closed (not as a duplicate), unlocked questions with zero or negative score having no positively scored or accepted answers or pending reopen votes, that were closed 9 or more days ago and ...
6
Voting to close is considered a privilege which is attained at 3,000 reputation. Before this milestone, your only option to initiate this would be to flag a question for moderator attention and requestion closure (another privilege requiring only 15 reputation):
(Note that you may not see the close option in the above image.)
The above is the appropriate ...
5
Given that people can change their minds, this isn't a problem (in the same way that you can retract a close vote).
There isn't a good reason to disallow close votes - given that edits or additional comments may push the question to something that you'd rather close (for example).
4
This formed part of a bigger "post notice update" that was rolled out 3 weeks ago. The post notices now appear differently, depending on the viewer:
Closed notice – Post owner:
Closed notice – Users with 3,000+ reputation (the minimum requirement for the vote to close/re-open privilege):
Closed notice – Public view:
Where did the "On Hold&...
4
There are different types of questions answered in comments.
The perhaps most common ones are those where the issue is a package or distribution version problem or a simple input error (mistyped or inexistent command), which are solved with a software update or by fixing the input.
In my opinion, such questions should be closed as off-topic, because they ...
4
You can only vote-to-close once on a question, and also only retract such a close-vote once. After that, you'll only be a spectator in the vote-to-close activity.
My typical "hunt for duplicate" approach is to use the main site to search for a duplicate. Once found I proceed to cast the vote-to-close rather than using the search-for-duplicate feature ...
4
Closing is not a death sentence. Close, edit, reopen. The closed question is likely to attract fewer downvotes pending edits, so in some ways, closing is actually helpful. It protects bad questions from being massively downvoted, so they start from a better place when they’re reopened after edits.
Of course, there’s the problem that closing looks final, ...
2
In addition to the paths already mentioned, I would say:
Code review,
Emacs
and
Mathematics.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible