So torn about closing this question: music.stackexchange.com/questions/26850/…

Are the stage sets an integral part of opera performance?

Are questions about fashion trends in music on topic in general (even if this question about opera stylings is not)?

@Dave I would guess not. It's seems this would be much better for the Music Fan SE.

Does it hurt to keep it open?

I don't think so.

Stack Overflow has the luxury problem of too much input.

We, and most SE's, do not.

Still there's very high standards applied, and people want to shoot down questions, for some reason.

The low quality stuff should be pruned, no doubt about it. But where there is some doubt, in almost all cases we'd be better off keeping it open. In my mind.

The bad stuff quickly gets identified and shot down, so that's not a problem.

The question is purely about stage design though. It's not really directly related to music which this SE is about.

It's at least related to music.

If we close it, we risk alienating a potential member who might contribute with a lot of good stuff.

That's one very compelling reason to adopt a live and let live attitude.

Within reasonable limits.

We need to have a scope though and this falls outside it. We could just allow any question that is asked on our site if growth is all we should care about.

I see a need to let e.g. cooking questions be out of the scope. But I don't see a problem with stretching it, at this stage.

The massive success of Stack Overflow is detrimental to most other sites in the SE network.

But I can say what I eat affects how I preform on stage and it is a vital question.

Many users come from the mothership, and feel the need to apply the same harsh criteria applied there.

Surely you see the difference between a cooking question and a stage setup question.

If there were another site, fine.

And this particular question would fit better on Music fans.

But it's not as clear cut as other questions we close and point to the music fans se.

I have yet to see a credible reason why we need to be so hardcore about scope.

For Stack Overflow, the rules came about to remedy problems faced there.

It's another subject, with a different set of users. It is not clear that the path to success is applying the same set of rules.

Because when the Music Fan SE comes up, we need to know what belongs here and what belongs there. Also this the rules in the FAQ are based on the problem questions that were seen in the first few months of the beta.

I'm not so sure we need black and white rules that could be applied by an AI.

Not black and white, but boundries

There will always be grey area.

But we can't and shouldn't have the same questions appear on both sites.

No, but until that SE exists, I think we could accept borderline questions.

I hung around the site for a while to get the hang of it, and ideally people would do that.

But a lot of people do not, and I would imagine getting your first question shot down is discouraging.

Listen I understand what you are saying, but being welcoming to new users is different then bending the scope for them. We have currently no stage design questions and I don't think were going to get many more.

Exactly, so this one won't hurt... :)

My second question was closed as off-topic. It took me a few questions to learn the do's and dont's/

It should be pointed out what's wrong, it's the closing I don't always agree with.

Comment and/or edit and see what happens.

As a site we should decided it. That's what the close review is for. If 3 people say leave it open it leaves the queue.

We've seen that poor questions generate great answers. I think the scale can be pushed towards a more accepting attitude with good results.

But it's easy to get sucked into closing questions if someone nominated it.

I myself did this in the beginning, since it felt like the right thing to do.

There's likely some psychological label on why we act like this.

If a poor question would have 10 votes from the start, people would vote it up, rather than vote to close. And vice versa.

There's a difference between poor questions and off-topic questions.

Still, the principle applies.

I've upvoted a lot of questions people nominated for closing.

If the "keepers" were first to a question, the outcome would be different.

We typically don't close a poor questions though. Don't confuse someone voting to close something with it being closed.

I guess it boils down to that my mindset is that I'd rather have some dubious questions in order to keep the good borderline ones, or the ones that started poor but became great generators of knowledge. The same applies to the outer limits of the scope.

Also, if Music Fans comes alive, we can migrate questions there.

Now we send people away with no place to go.

Still, I don't want pure fan questions here anyhow.

It's just a slight adjustment towards letting stuff slide I would like to see.

I regularly vote to close a question with no votes if I feel it is borderline just so more of the community can think about the question in depth. If I see a borderline question in the queue I will typically leave it open or skip.

@MeaningfulUsername That's how many users feel.

It's why the site shaped up the way it did.

I thought that upvotes on a question raised the number of close votes needed.

On other places, I've seen a question with nine upvotes being closed by five close votes. That is skewed to me.

I need to go for a while. See ya later :).

@MeaningfulUsername Ok we can talk about this later if you want.

I think I need more sleep I misread two questions and answered them today.

Today, a question I answered on StackOverflow in July 2013 - which at the time was completely ignored by the OP, was upvoted and accepted! That's one hell of a slow development process!

@Chris That's interesting.

@Dom - I presume you have an Area51 account? Mind flagging this? area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/81259/…

@Chris Done

Cheers. Seemed a bit daft to create an account just to do that.

The user that proposed it is pretty active in SE : stackexchange.com/users/399183/lego-stormtroopr

Yeah, I was just looking at that. Looks like a compromised account... :-.

:-/

@NReilingh How's everything.

@Chris As of now his Area51 account is suspended.