Closing because question "abandoned"?

Question

Recently I've come across a large number of questions in the Home Improvement Stack Review Close Votes queue that are marked to be closed for "a community-specific reason", with the written-in reason "I’m voting to close this question because it's been abandoned." They all have no answer accepted, and no response from the OP for quite a while, although a number of them seem to be reasonable questions with reasonable answers. To my mind, if a question is reasonable, on-topic, and has useful answers, they should be left open in case the OP does come back to accept an answer, or (more likely) another answer is added. It also seems to waste reviewer time as three other reviewers have to confirm the original nomination for closure.

Is it appropriate and useful to close questions that are reasonable, on-topic, have answers, but have no answer accepted?

Some examples:

• "How to properly insulate a bathroom with 2 walls been concrete blocks?" (question has two total votes, one answer)
• "Cause for an Amana electric dryer overheating" (question has two total votes, one answer)
• "Kenmore 51789 Fridge - Trying to Troubleshoot Defrost Problem" (question has one total vote, one answer)
• "Aluminum Fence posts set into concrete" (question has one total vote, two answers)
• "Wiring a new shop advice" (question has one total vote, one answer)

Answer 1

tl;dr no, we shouldn't be closing well-written, on-topic questions.

The longer answer:

Judge each question on its own merits. If it's on-topic, and has enough detail to get good answers, then it should remain open. Most of the traffic to the site comes from Google searches, so we're building a library of knowledge not just for the people who post the questions, but all future users that run into the same issue. As you point out, closing prevents new answers from being posted. That could mean we miss out on valuable new information if someone spots a nuance in the question that no-one else did because they had the exact same problem and came up with a novel solution.

---

Looking at the timeline of the example posts that you linked to, all of them had a Community bump right before the first vote to close, which means they had no upvoted answers. Again, upvote good answers, or provide a better answer than the existing ones. We've talked about this before:

• Why does "Community" regularly bring very old topics back up to the top

• Why so many Community bumps? Can/should it be changed?

Answer 2

We already have close reasons for those cases.

Abandonment doesn't matter if the question is answerable

That is, if there's enough there for answers to be meaningful, then that's it. Here's an example.

Question: I am bringing electrical service to a shed where I'll feed a subpanel. Fed off a 100A breaker in the main panel. Sites on the internet say to use #1, #1, #1 and #6 aluminum wire (smaller is for ground). But my electrician buddy says I should use #1/0 aluminum. Who's right?

Comment: How far is the distance?
Comment: Are you in Canada?

See, it would be nice to have that additional information so we can try to figure out what the electrician is thinking. But the question is answerable straight-up.

Other close reasons already exist - use those.

Generally, "abandonment" is only a problem because a question was left incomplete for some reason.

The problem is the problem. The reason for the problem is that they abandoned the questions, but that isn't the problem. See how that's sorta like the XY problem? Or the general advice to avoid assigning motive.

Question: I am bringing electrical service to a shed where I'll feed a subpanel. What size of wire should I use?

Comment: How many amps do you want to deliver? silkwor Comment: Yeah, what size breaker will this feed off of?

(wait awhile)

Close - needs details or clarity

Question: What kind of smart switch do I need for /2 wiring in a 3-way network? (it was miswired before)

Comment: Shopping questions are off-topic. Can you rephrase into an allowed question?

(wait awhile)

Close: Product Recommendations tend to go obsolete quickly.

Answer 3

I'm the guilty party, and I've had my hand well and truly slapped.

I agree 100% with manassehkatz (on multiple counts...) about them being annoying, especially on posts that are 2+ years old by someone with all of one question to his name.

I based my VTC on the response to this meta-qeuestion. VtC was one of the options given there. It seems, based on that question that having a score of -1 should be sufficient to stop it from being bumped, so if I could do that, I did. If I couldn't get it to -1, I still DV'd and also VtC.

Obviously that was very much the wrong thing to do and has gotten everyone all bent out of shape, so I'll happily stop. We don't want cranky users...

Answer 4

In general, closing abandoned unclear questions without any good answer is often appropriate. In fact, it can sometimes be the only appropriate thing to do with them, if they cannot be answered or edited into shape by anyone but their absent author.

The subtlety here is that "abandoned" alone isn't really a valid question close reason. "Abandoned and missing essential information" is, however. The current formal SE term for such questions, as used in the close menu, is "needs details or clarity":

Needs details or clarity
This question should include more details and clarify the problem.

(For that matter, this is a valid close reason even if the question isn't abandoned. If the asker does come back and provide the missing details, the question can always be reopened.)

Of course, not all questions bumped by Community♦ deserve to be closed for this reason; there are also several other ways to handle them. In particular, if the question already has a decent answer, upvoting the answer will stop it from being bumped. If it doesn't, but is on-topic and clear enough that you can answer it yourself, doing so (and having someone else upvote your answer) will also work. If you can't answer it, but think that someone else can and should, upvoting and possibly editing the question to improve it is also a valid option.

Conversely, if the question is of low quality and you don't think it adds value to the side, you should downvote it (possibly in addition to voting to close it). In particular, downvoting a question to -1 or lower will prevent it from being bumped and in some cases can actually lead to it being deleted by an automatic cleanup script.

Answer 5

I don't know if it is the case with these particular questions, but I am constantly annoyed by the "Community bump". It has gotten to the point that when I scroll through the list of questions to see what's new/updated, I zip right past anything marked "Community". These questions keep getting bumped over and over, and there seems to be no way of stopping it except for closing a question. Closing is truly not the right thing to do most of the time. Is there something else we can do? Any way to tag the question such that "Community bump" will ignore it? For that matter, the "Community bump" almost never makes much sense here. Let OP come back and edit their own question, which will be a real bump, if they want to get more activity. < /rant>