6

So this question popped up on my close review queue. Instead of voting to close it, I found it interesting enough to answer. From the question text I can understand what kind of a problem the author has, and that's a question that I've heard before in real life. Because of that I felt that an answer is warranted. Note, that apart from the downvotes and close votes there are no comments to this question that suggest any potential improvements.

In your opinion, did I misjudge, and should have voted to close, or is it an OK question that could help future visitors and thus can be allowed to live and be answered?

Also apologies, this is just a reality check, - I expect to hear that I was right and if that's the reply that I get I can trust my judgement for some more time =) Otherwise I hope that the community can help me re-adjust my criteria for what an ok question is. I've read lately a lot of discussions on meta that bad questions should not be answered, so just wanted to be sure.

1
  • 4
    Not all bad questions are off topic questions.
    – Raedwald
    Commented Jun 13, 2016 at 16:54

2 Answers 2

10

It's not a horrible question.

What he's trying to discover is what we'd call 'best effort' logging, where you call a method to log something and know that the library code is going to try to log in a succession of ways, until it ultimately gives up because nothing is working. What he needs is a decent library to do that.

When it comes to this more generally, we only ask that if you're able to figure out a question that is .. less than spectacular, you make some edits to make it more spectacular in conjunction with answering. We're a Q&A site, making it any more complicated than that (or basically saying "only answer on a site where people go to answer stuff if [x] or [z] but not [y]" - and that sort of undocumented complexity tends to blow up.

Try to not feed the help vamps if you can avoid it. You can tell the kid that waited until the last minute to do their homework, and posted it on the site instead. Beyond that, if it appears that any amount of effort has gone into asking something and you can understand & edit - have at it, that's why we're here.

2

If a question meets the criteria for closure, it should be closed. That's what it's for. I feel absolutely no sympathy or reason to answer questions where the author has not taken the time to read the how to ask and on topic guides.

That said, unclear what you're asking, which seems to be the close reason for this question, is somewhat different. If you understand what they're asking and it doesn't suit any other close reasons, go ahead and answer. You could even edit their question to clarify it if you want to prevent it from being closed.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/267540/dont-answer-bad-questions
meta.stackoverflow.com
CC-MAIN-2024-38
118171
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:O5GABA6RMXKB5UW5LEPDW3Y5LJLIUG2P
<urn:uuid:3690401e-c9f4-4c6e-9bae-6446709e6719>
2024-09-21T00:18:48Z
172.64.155.249
text/html
sha1:44CGKW6VBJOHIJKOL3HPCOW4L6EEBUML
<urn:uuid:af2985ee-884f-4caa-8824-96366e440921>
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/267540/dont-answer-bad-questions
response
<urn:uuid:23d6dbd6-db36-4390-85d3-7090433b4b35>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-38
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-15
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/