Evil Genius

@PolyGeo You are so entrenched in a reality of your own creation that I truly believe now that you can't tell the difference between it and everything else. I wish you luck when you finally realize that you are the only one there, alone.

@Midavalo It's literally the question you reopened and the one that started this conversation. It's not cherry picked, I'm just really curious if PolyGeo's statement about always (his word) assessing a question applied to the one being discussed.

@PolyGeo @PolyGeo This begs the question: Did you assess the question (gis.stackexchange.com/questions/83387/…)? You unilaterally closed it 4 years after it was answered, at the time it appears it had score of 16, an accepted answer with a score of at least 20 ( gis.stackexchange.com/posts/83387/…, gis.stackexchange.com/posts/83448/…).

While in some cases, being able to reproduce an error from code is absolutely necessary, in others it's not even relevant. This is another case of a guideline turned law.

This is relevant: gis.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4312/…

It's a super strict interpretation of "the shortest code necessary to reproduce it in the question itself." (Part of the close reason) The expectation seems to be that any question involving code (SQL included) should have a code block that can be copy/pasted and run to produce the problem, more or less. Otherwise it's off topic (not my view, but this is what's happening).

Sorry, it is still visible (which is something good I suppose)....the bottom of the close message is pretty misleading: (Viewable by the post author and users with the close/reopen votes privilege)

Most likely because it was tagged with postgis and didn't contain executable code. Sad that a question with score of 23 and an accepted answer scored 26 is no longer visible to casual/new users on the site. It has been voted on to reopen twice, both failed (gis.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/164297, gis.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/177545)

@PolyGeo I agree...I didn't see anything about how to participate in that post though...will it be visible on GIS or do we have to go looking for it somewhere?

@AndreSilva I'm not seeing other questions like this, but I'd do it with GenerateNearTable in ArcGIS (requires Info/Advanced license). Only hang up is how to measure what is closer for multiple points within a polygon. Technically the distance is 0 since they intersect, so would you want closest to centroid, boundary, etc.?

In cases like that, a solid state drive and some more RAM will make a huge difference, since the issue is about IO.

Now, looking at my work machine which is a 'modern' Dell system (Latitude E6440 I believe), it can barely run ArcGIS Pro. My company has a virus scanner, malware scanner, an executable scanner (we can only run whitelisted programs/libraries), network scanner, firewall and who knows what else continuously running in the background. I'm sure if I could turn even half of those off I'd get much better performance...but I can't :).

@De_Facto_Fish It really depends on what type of work you are doing and what else is running on the machine. I've got a laptop that sounds pretty similar to your's (may be a bit older even) that still runs great (runs Windows 10, I can even do some gaming on it). I haven't used it for GIS in several years, but I used to use it for raster processing with GRASS and it was fine for that.

Another good example of how editing changes how a question is perceived: gis.stackexchange.com/posts/288968/revisions

Something else I think is worth pointing out to (@PolyGeo): you've erroded the trust the users of this community have in you. This isn't a new thing and it's not something easily or quickly fixed, if at all. Every time I see a post that you've edited now I'm going to wonder about the intentions and have to look at the history to see what the original author actually intended to convey. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I was wondering how long that was going to take. Sad.

I'm having difficulty putting into words how much the behavior around this post disappoints, and somewhat even bewilders me. @PolyGeo , I do believe that you truly believe that you were improving this situation. But, I disagree and I feel this is bordering on censorship. I realize we will not agree on this (and I don't expect us to), but I find the outright dismissal very troubling.

I have to agree with @AndreSilva, the additional detail makes this much more clear about why the question was asked, and while I understand the intent of removing some specific details, it changed the meaning of the question. I guess I need to start poking around at the edit history more often...

In addition to what Midavalo and PolyGeo have pointed out, the How to not be a spammer page does touch on this as well, but the emphasis is again avoiding self-promotion.

I think part of the issue here is just a matter of communication. You've mentioned PostGIS, shapefiles and linking a few times in your question. My initial reaction isn't unlike other commenters here; Are you talking about joining non-spatial and spatial data withing PostGIS? Or are you actually talking about trying to do some sort of link between PostGIS and a shape file (which is completely separate from PostgreSQL)?

Given Grace Note's note, I've nominated myself! At the very least I can help the election proceed.

It may be possible that the preferred time zone is influencing possible nominees. I considered putting in myself but I see that both nominees are much better situated within the preferred time frames than I am, and I'd be happy with both.

You'll want to research and possibly ask about extracting vector data from a raster separately from this question. This site works best with single focused questions.