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With the avalanche of new questions comes a new category consisting of 2-3 lines of text hastily scribbled down, missing lots of essential information (Very often that it's supposed to be free, or missing the programming language).

Examples:

Python remote jobs manager
Alternative of BMC Control-M
UEFI Shell: efi program to search text
....

Currently the best we can do is add a comment that points to http://meta.softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/336/what-is-required-for-a-question-to-contain-enough-information, but that's a lot of work, relatively.
(I'm using a third party macro tool to quickly paste some text, that helps).

Over on EarthScience they had exactly the same issue with rock identification questions, and they solved it by adding the close reason

Please review our rock identification guidelines to provide the missing information so that your question is both answerable and useful to new users.

enter image description here

The result is that incomplete rock ID questions are now quickly put on hold, sending a clear signal that the question "isn't good enough".

Can we have the same here, pointing to the 'what is required' question?
The text could be identical, just a different link.

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1 Answer 1

1

Unfortunately it seems that we can not create top-level close reasons, they have to be within "off-topic". This results in this notice being shown to all readers:

enter image description here

PROBLEM: The question is not off-topic at all. It is very much on-topic, but just lacking budget and OS information, for instance.

So, I am afraid we can not such a close reason with the current (2019) Stack Exchange software.

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  • It should be noted that SE sites routinely use "off-topic" to mean "various reasons", rather than the actual topicality. Please don't ask why, but that's just what we do. So saying things like "off-topic due to lacking information", while prima facie silly, is the Stack Exchange way. Commented May 29, 2019 at 20:05

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