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Some questions are blatantly off-topic, to the point that no explanation is needed beyond stating this fact. I'm not using a real example, but the situation is not hypothetical.

One of my front teeth is loose, is there anything I can do to fix it in its place?

This looks off-topic to me, but what is the reason?

  • a question about creating/developing a web application? No, it's not that.
  • Application/website recommendation? No.
  • applications that are no longer available? No.
  • belongs on another site? Not on any we can migrate to, if any at all.

So, one has to write a custom close reason, explaining that teeth are not web applications. This is particularly annoying because it feels like feeding a troll.

On SE sites, the off-topic dialog comes with a pre-filled option:

Not about {site subject}, within the scope defined in the Help Center.

E.g., Mathematics still has it:

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I propose adding this reason back to the dialog, so that blatantly off-topic posts can be disposed of as quietly as possible.

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I am not entirely sure this close reason is warranted at the moment.

I searched for recently closed questions and looked through the first 50 questions. There were approximately 3 questions that had been closed with the reason Not about {site subject}, within the scope defined in the Help Center.

On this basis, my opinion is to leave the close reasons as they are for now. If these types of questions increase then I'd be more than happy to add it back in at a later date.

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  • There are other problematic closures caused by the lack of plain off-topic reason. Users are constantly migrating questions to Super User, even if they should have been closed in place (because they are low quality, vague or already asked on SU many times).
    – user79865
    Aug 15, 2015 at 0:52
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    @NormalHuman that's a different problem. Poor quality questions should be closed with one of the other reasons not "off topic" eg. "unclear" or "too broad" etc.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Aug 15, 2015 at 12:01

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