tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Hiding closed threads)

Sonia Balagopalan comments on "Hiding closed threads" (79)

Sonia Balagopalan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:10:38 -0700

I happened to witness your experiment in real-time. It pushed the question to the top of the 'active' pile, but not to the 'hot' pile. (I still haven't figured out what makes a question hot.) But the option of locking posts makes sense.
By the way, I think you guys (mods and admins) have been doing an awesome job setting up and running MO. Cheers!

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Hiding closed threads" (78)

Anton Geraschenko — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:55:18 -0700

I don't think closed questions should be hidden by default. If we wanted that, we would just delete them. Part of the point of having closed questions hang around is to provide a record of the kinds of questions that aren't appropriate for the site. The point of closing a question is that you can no longer answer it or vote on it, so it doesn't generate reputation and it mostly doesn't get pushed to the top of the pile (comments don't push the question to the front page). Editing the question still pushes it to the top of the front page, but that is the desired behavior. Perhaps the edit cleans the question up to the point that it will be reopened (something that usually takes five votes from high reputation members of the community).

I haven't seen a situation where closed questions keep getting pushed to the top of the pile, so I'm not too worried about this. If you do come across a situation where it's getting out of hand, flag the post for moderator attention, with a note asking a moderator to lock the post. This prevents any non-moderator activity on the post. Unfortunately, it also prevents people from leaving comments, which is why we don't lock all closed questions.

Sonia Balagopalan comments on "Hiding closed threads" (77)

Sonia Balagopalan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:15:52 -0700

Closed questions tend to spend a lot of time at the top of the pile, maybe because we are curious creatures. Does anybody else find this a distraction? And I fear that as more people find out about MO, there will be more (even possibly unknowing) attempts at misuse and there will be quite a few closed questions on the top page at any given time. Is there any way we can hide closed posts, even if we don't delete them, like creating a [closed] tag, which will be hidden by default. I don't think we should delete closed questions as a rule. They may come in handy to point out to people why certain questions are inappropriate, to try and avoid duplication, etc.