As I have mentioned in some comments, I fall under the stand point of "Keep old questions unless completely unanswerable". In the case where we ask questions about what has been done and the original asker decides to abandon it, the answer can simply become what we would be asking about.
This a...
Interesting idea! "the answer can simply become what we would be asking about" is something I never considered seriously, maybe because I've gotten to used to the SE concept of only using the "answer" section to answer questions, and for everything else to go in comments or chat. The #1 issue I have with "keep old questions unless completely unanswerable" is that our unanswered queue will get big, and then people looking to answer an unanswered question will get overwhelmed with the volume of them. I'd like to keep this list down to 1 page. Also if the Q is abandoned, people might waste time.
This solves the problem of it being unanswered in the queue, while still leaving it in a state where it is clear that it needs to be revisited if the original author comes back (since the answer does not actually solve the problem). Maybe a note at the top of the question should be edited in that it seems abandoned.
Similar to negative results not being published in literature typically (a bad trend in science), simply knowing others are asking about a problem is enough to be useful to someone potentially.
Why don't we just close the question though, this way it doesn't show up in the "unanswered queue", and if someone wants to answer, they can write a comment saying that they have an answer: then the question gets immediately re-opened! Your suggestion is interesting: Let people answer without clarification about what the original user really wanted. That could be possible too, but we might need a separate Meta discussion on how far away from direct answers we're happy to accept answers.
Even easier than non-closed questions that have an answer, because closed questions still show up on Google searches (as do non-closed questions), and they also show up if you use the site's internal search function (so they are treated on the same footing as non-closed questions, in terms of searchability), but closed questions have the advantage that you can specify in the search query that you want only the closed questions, and this therefore gives one additional route to finding closed questions, that isn't there for non-closed questions (search for non-closed & you'll get 99% of the Qs)
Hmm then I am torn, I feel that digging through a comment chain is less helpful than a summarized answer of what was found but at the same time closing does not inherently prevent the answer from being found. Then again, it does require the user to request to reopen. This is an unneeded step ideally. Maybe there should be a difference between truly abandoned and abandoned with effort applied (enough that it may have been the answer but the user never confirms).
It is truly the most "interesting" case we have encountered so far I think. There's many thoughts flooding through my mind. But one that stands out is that having a question get "closed" can be good motivation (perhaps the most effective type of motivation) in getting users to put in effort to meet the minimum standards we desire for questions. The user is likely to sign into StackExchange again at some point, and when they do, they will see a big fat notification saying "your question has been closed", and I imagine that might make them realize they need to do something.
I think this should become a separate meta question since it deviates from what you proposed earlier but I do believe comments should be considered more less solid than an answer. The procedure for closing an abandoned question should probably be move any information that is a potential answer to a community wiki answer and close it with a specific notice. This preserves information and nudges the user if they ever come back.
The part I'm not in agreement with, is that "it nudges the user if they ever come back". I think they'll come back and see a community wiki answer, and think "okay there's an answer... I don't have to do anything here". Also the more serious issue in my opinion is that when these questions are left open, people can have serious amounts of their time wasted on trying to get it answered.
In the example that started this thread, I was doing one of my frequent scans of the unanswered questions list, and clicked on every single one of them to see if there was anything I could do to get it answe…
By the way, I'm not so keen on new chat rooms being created every time a comment chain gets long:
The observation
Some sites have hundreds of rooms with almost the same title; for example, there's an entire page of rooms on Mathematics.SE that were created from the comments on a specific question or answer:
Most of these rooms end up getting frozen, because they are only relevant for a very ...
I know in this case the suggestion was made to you by the system. It's a suggestion that I think doesn't need to be there for Meta discussions, and on the main site I would prefer if it also gave people the option of talking in an existing chat room.
Then I disagree with the idea of having the question stick around to begin with. Comments should not suggest an answer, which is then verified and added as an answer. Rather, an answer which proposes a solution should be added and the user should be responsible for verifying the answer. This SE site functions in very non-SE manners.
It should be closed as unclear early or left unanswered. I don't think a community answer which states "This question seems abandoned" tells the user there is nothing to do there if they still have the same issue.
It tells them, this is what we concluded, come back and correct us if we are wrong and you still need help. Otherwise, that suggestion probably worked. Especially in these sort of debugging cases (which I do agree might not be a great fit for this SE)
And actually I moved it to chat because I think that reading massive comment threads is difficult on SE and the word limit can be restrictive.
@NikeDattani I will take whatever approach is agreed on, I just feel that closing questions simply because the user doesn't confirm the answer is somewhat misleading. A user searching that question may see its closed and not look in comments for example.
I appreciate that, but in the future I would prefer to have as few additional rooms created as possible, and if more needs to be discussed I'd prefer to do it in an existing room such as the "main" room, called "Modeling Matters" .. it might even help more people to participate in the discussion, since not many people look at Meta, and the title of this room makes it look like a discussion between only 2 people.
You could add a comment like: "Let's continue this in [chat](link to the permalink of the chat message where you start the conversation)".
@TristanMaxson Unfortunately not. Neither of us are "room owners" of this room, but a moderator can move all our messages from here to Modeling Matters. But this room will still exist (without any messages). Maybe we can rename it to ORCA or something, since the orca software tag is quite big but there's no room for it yet. I do want to avoid what happened at Mathematics.SE which is that there's over 20,000 closed rooms.
Meta Matters
Meta Matters