The weird thing is that if someone moves the comments under a Q or an A to chat, then you can't remove them afterward, even though you originally posted them as comments which you could remove at will.
This power strikes me as ironic, since I'm always removing the bash tag from irrelevant questions, doubly ironic in that it seems that initial mis-tagging grants misplaced power :)
@JeffSchaller, editing the duplicate list? It allows putting more than one question there, which might be useful if you find two with different (but useful) answers.
@JeffSchaller In the beggining when having the first gold tag, I ended up forgetting I could close questions alone and often closed them. Gold tags should ask whether we want to vote or close ;)
@JeffSchaller Yes, exactly, and it was a bit of lazy typing on my part. I missed most of the above discussion due to being out and about. Looks like you covorod the important bits though.
@JeffSchaller Don't worry. Make the mistakes, and then right them again. After a while, you'll make less of them.
@JeffSchaller We've had a few discussions about voting reasons. This particular one did not have a question, did not repeat the requirement in the title in the body of the question, "asked for a script" and uses irrelevant tags.
@Archemar aye, that's one in the direction of "close with custom comments"; I've been "lazy" with VTC-unclear as a shorthand for "what's the actual problem you're facing?"
(dancing the edge of "we write scripts whenever we want to")
When it comes to adding up a few numbers and dividing that sum, I really would want to see what issues they have with doing that rather than "show me how to do it".
That additionally makes room for actually explaining something about what it is they are having issues with.
Note: The question may well be reopened if it is reformulated so that the issues that you are facing in implementing your solution can actually be addressed. — Kusalananda19 secs ago
The hard thing here is that closing a question can be reversed if the question is edited, but downvotes not that easily. You don't get any notification if questions you downvoted or commented on were edited, so it's just up to chance to be able to reverse that downvote.
so yeah, sometimes it feels that none of the close reasons reeeally match, but downvoting because the Q is "not useful" is still warranted. And then the asker doesn't really get a chance to have the downvote reversed
@ilkkachu That begs the question what the votes on a question are actually for. A question is upvoted if it is a good question. What does that mean for the question? Well, it means slightly higher visibility, possibly, but not much.
I think that's why I hesitate to downvote Q's like that, for new users -- above and beyond the "be nice" campaign; if the person hasn't even explained The Question yet, maybe there's an interesting-enough problem in there to solve, if they can just edit into shape after being closed.
reminds me a bit of the triage queue on SO -- meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/278380/… -- where questionable questions get some review before they're visible on the site. That'd push not-a-question homework questions into the close-queue and avoid "needless" downvoting.