@amWhy I am unable to stop looking at the the votes in order to determine whether a post should be deleted since I don't do it at all. I see no point in telling the OP that $x$ must be non-negative. It is clear that he knows that $-1/4$ cannot possible be a solution. For the same reason, the final sentence is a waste of time.
Polling for opinions. This dismal question was duly closed, but generated an in my opinion nice answer. It is probably old hat to group theorists, but I don't recall seeing that argument earlier. Therefore I will make a salvage effort. But, I think a completely rewritten version is probably best. What do you think? I guess I will follow the standard procedure and give the OP a good faith chance to fix their post.
A misgiving I have is that it is very contrived for me to now rewrite the question. Ideally this would be a duplicate, and I could invite Giorgos to copy/paste their answer there. Alas, I could not find a good one.
@JyrkiLahtonen I cannot say anything about whether the problem is interesting or not, because that is not my area of expertise. But if it is (and is not a duplicate) then a new question might be the best, in the spirit of Guidelines for context edits and rewrites: “If the question is unsalvageable, you can rewrite it entirely by posting a new question.”
@JyrkiLahtonen I'm sorry, but that question is a poster child for "PSQs". The whole point of the EoQS was to encourage would-be-answerers to hold off answering, unless and until the OP improved the question, and encouraging potential answerers to assist the OP in approving the, with a link, e.g., to "How to ask a good question". There are many deleted questions that were better asked than this question.
@JyrkiLahtonen Improve a better question; please don't award an asker for a shitty non-question.
Note also, @user21820 There is no "one size fits all" regarding questions about groups of order n.
@XanderHenderson Absolutely. I answered your question. So what do we do? Yes: PSQ with five upvotes and an answerer with five votes, and another PSQ answerer who tried to answer. *8 downvotes, minimally are required, without intervention from those who reopen just to frustrate closers. I find such posts every ten minutes I'm here. What do you suggest? I'm fully aware of such abuse, do you think you need to inform most of us? Usually, we're the ones informing mods.
We are generally the ones who find more low quality questions and answers that we have votes for, and now you point out some of which we already reviewed. Are we to give priority to actions on the posts you link, @Xander? (10 requests today, in the last three others.)
@amWhy Yes I agree, which is why I said "basic techniques". What I had in mind was just that an FAQ that covers the basic techniques would be better than singular questions each about a specific possible order.
@user21820 But "basic techniques" is itself too wide a category. Is the order prime? then......., is the order identical to orders of symmetric groups, then, ...., Can the group of order 15 be written .... etc.... If algebra isn't your thing, you might not understand. Anyway, the question Jyrki linked needs to be closed. If someone wants to cover all ways to identify an order of a group, with a group, fine. But the question posted by Jyrki is worse than a PSQ. There are better posts to use
... as a basis for a abstract dupe.
@Xander Please trust that users in the chat room have nuanced ways in which we encounter poor question, (which shouldn't be answered), and poor answers), and we could use more moderator help, than mods need to have our help.
@amWhy Of course I know there are a plethora of basic techniques for that. But I've seen some really big FAQs on Math SE before, so I am not against such an FAQ. And of course we agree that the question mentioned here is a PSQ, which is the reason for my close-vote and downvote and delete-vote. Moreover, it is now up for deletion.
@user21820 Thanks for the heads up. One more delete vote needed. If a very long FAQ on the orders of various groups can be written well, I'm all for it. I haven't viewed such lengthy posts, so my comments earlier were in terms of the length of an answer to a post, which is not TL;DR ;D
@user21820 Do you have any delete vote requests? I prefer those you list, over another frequent poster.
In any event, a lot of the questions / answers I post here are those that I come across while following up on EoQS flags. If I close a bunch of questions and then send a message to a user regarding several borderline questions which I have unilaterally closed, then the user can easily respond "The moderator(s) acted unilaterally, the community should have a chance to voice an opinion!"
@XanderHenderson I understand. I'm sorry I didn't realize you were trying to get feedback on flagged @EoQS. I am sorry that my cluelessness of that didn't read your mind. I understand you are not at liberty to say more than what you say, but please don't assume we are angry when addressing comments we don't understand. Again, apologies, I meant no ill intent, Me bad, me bad, me bad :(
It's frustrating that we are intentionally kept in the dark, and frustrating for you and other mods that you can say only so much, which explains most of the misunderstandings being mods and users. It's the nature of SE, it seems. From now on I will always regard your words as more informed than mind, @Xander.
@amWhy It is frustrating for me, also, that moderation on Math SE cannot be more transparent, but this is the system set up by the SE overlords, enforced via an NDA, and there is not a lot that I can do to change that.
I haven't noticed Bill Dubuque for quite some time. In the previous year or two, he was tackling many dupes, and would stop in here for assistance for closing dupes. In any case, I miss the guy.
