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Is it worth having a closed tag (as well as "[closed]" in the title) as this stackexchange site seems to have a lot of closed questions and a closed tag would make it really useful to put it in the ignore tag list.

Apologies if this has been asked already.

Cheers

Jared

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  • I was all set to disagree with you until your last sentence. "...to put in the ignore tag list". If you put "game-rec" in your ignore list, you'll remove a ton of the closed questions as-is, I don't think another whole tag is necessary for additional minor functunality. – Raven Dreamer Mar 7 '11 at 23:11
  • @Raven Dreamer, sure but there are other tags that get closed. Would it not be easier to just add the tag "closed" when a question gets closed and then we'd only need to worry about having "closed" tag in ignore list. As some tags that do have closed questions have legitimate questions in them. – Jared Mar 7 '11 at 23:19
  • @Jared - I suppose I just am not seeing why "closed" questions need some sort of ability to be blocked en masse. What about "closed" questions makes you not want to view them? – Raven Dreamer Mar 8 '11 at 4:30
  • @Raven Dream - heh "What about "closed" questions makes you not want to view them?" seems like a trick question to me :) Why would I want to read something that is irrelevant to the questions on this site? The answer is I wouldn't, hence the reason I'd like to ignore them. I'm bit surprised actually that nobody has thought of doing something like this already. The ignore tag list is a brilliant idea and on this specific stackexchange (with many closed questions), having a closed tag would make it so much easier to skip past them all. Making use of already built in functionality if you will. – Jared Mar 8 '11 at 4:56
  • @Jared - you're assuming all closed questions are either off-topic or otherwise not relevant (subjective, etc.). Highly opinionated questions "Best FPS in 2010", for instance, don't have a place on our site, but could remain interesting topics to think about. Duplicate questions are useful because not everyone looks for information in the same way. I know badp has a link somewhere to Jeff talking about the usefulness of keeping duplicate questions. – Raven Dreamer Mar 8 '11 at 6:14
  • At least, I think it was @Badp. – Raven Dreamer Mar 8 '11 at 6:14
  • @Raven Dreamer - sure ok but I think you're also assuming I want to read those closed topics (in those specific exceptions) anyways. My opinion is that it should be up to me as the user what I want to see and read (hence the ignore tag feature) and gaming.se clearly has made the decision that subjective etc are questions not up to the user if they shall please to comment (if you so happen to not beat a moderator to the punchline:), so I see no difference in giving the optional tag to hide closed questions. CONT... – Jared Mar 8 '11 at 7:55
  • @Raven Dreamer - However in the situation of duplicate questions, you make a valid point, but how is adding a closed tag going to stop this? They don't hide the topic, they just eloquently make it easier to skip past them in the list. – Jared Mar 8 '11 at 7:56
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    Really, having almost 10% of our visible questions as "closed" is not really good. We should be deleting many of these, but note that it hasn't been until recently that the community could vote to delete such questions. As such, a habit probably hasn't particularly developed towards the cleanup of these. Just cutting out all the game-recs will cut down the number by nigh half. – Grace Note♦ Mar 8 '11 at 14:49
  • @Grace eh, you know I'm not a fan of deleting closed questions. They get the point through that we have and will close questions, and that it's nothing personal (each of us probably has a few of those). – badp Mar 9 '11 at 7:54
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Ignoring broken windows is a bad idea -- it's important that the community see

  1. there is a system of rules here that are enforced; if you ask poorly, your question may be closed too

  2. the closed questions, if closed incorrectly, can be peer reviewed, edited for improvements, flagged, or (assuming enough rep) voted to open.

Both of these things are critically important and neither can happen if we hide the "dirty laundry".

Now, if more than 50% of the questions on the home page are closed, then the site has much deeper problems of scope topic and messaging -- but you have provided no evidence that this is the case.

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/search?q=closed%3A1

495 closed questions

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions

5,551 questions

so about 8% of questions are closed; statistically this means on a homepage of 48 questions you can expect to see 3 or 4 closed questions. But this is necessary and even good for reasons #1 and #2 above.

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  • Hey Jeff many thanks for that. But do you not feel that as a user of the community, that we should not have a choice in using the ignore tag feature on questions we don't want to read? This is the basis of my point I'm trying to preach out :) P.s sorry to be off topic, but I really enjoyed your webstock '10 talk! :) – Jared Mar 8 '11 at 23:54
  • @Jared If you want to ignore closed questions feel free to do so; tags are not the way to go however. The question ID is in each link URL, combine this with the SO API... except I don't think it's a good idea. I actually want people to take a look on closed questions, maybe they can fix it or spot a question that has been, but shouldn't have closed. – badp Mar 9 '11 at 8:07
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It seems to me that your question should actually be "how can I hide closed posts", which is a very interesting concept. It's a question that is valid for all stackexchange sites, though, so it probably should go on the main meta site.

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  • definitely but I only visit this site and stackoverflow (which oddly doesn't have a lot of closes), but I could see definite uses if it were a global cross stackexchange tag. – Jared Mar 8 '11 at 7:40
  • Since you use stackoverflow, then you have access to meta.stackoverflow - I recommend you post "add the ability to hide closed questions" as a feature request there. – Oak Mar 8 '11 at 7:53
  • good idea, apparently already some discussions well before me can-a-closed-question-be-given-special-tags and proposing-a-new-closed-tag – Jared Mar 8 '11 at 8:12

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