Timeline for Why was this question closed as off-topic after a bug was discovered by the answers?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
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| Dec 28, 2016 at 19:09 | comment | added | cFreed | Thanks for the precision: now it's pretty clear (and BTW matches what I thought was "the right" answer. So for the sake of equity regarding the OP, and since I don't have reputation enough for casting votes, I'll flag the post to ask moderators to reopen it. | |
| Dec 28, 2016 at 18:51 | comment | added | Jamal Mod | @cFreed: I suppose I indeed didn't make that clear, but no, these questions shouldn't be closed. However, not everyone can easily tell if a question is either broken or just fails to satisfy one condition. As such, this is the time when new voters should cast reopen votes if they disagree with the closure (or any mod can just force it open again). | |
| Dec 28, 2016 at 18:44 | comment | added | cFreed | Thanks for this answer: you carefully (and indeed correctly) traced what successively happened. But, no offense, I insist: it doesn't answer to the main question, which is "Should the post be judged off-topic when there is no known or obvious bug at the time it's posted?". One thing is sure: there are several cases where it didn't happen, like the one reported by @EBrown, or the one I answered a few time ago (codereview.stackexchange.com/a/150158/69690), where the bug was far more obvious! I think that the current uncertainty about how to judge is a real "philosophical" issue. | |
| Dec 28, 2016 at 18:26 | comment | added | Der Kommissar | @Mast Questions should be closed if they don't work as expected is correct. To the best of your knowledge (and the post I mentioned) the code worked exactly as expected. It may have failed edge cases (or test cases we didn't think of because we don't use them), but in the end, it worked for our requirements. In the end, I think 'works as expected' is the defining term. You can have code that crashes in a specific situation, does that make it broken? Well, not necessarily. It may be designed to crash in that situation, and that's 'working as expected' in that case. | |
| Dec 28, 2016 at 18:23 | comment | added | Mast Mod | @EBrown We have a couple of those. Finding bugs doesn't make the question off-topic by definition, the severity of the bug is important as well. Here for example a lot of cases were tested and still a bug slipped through. But to the best of my knowledge, it worked as expected. Questions should be closed if they don't work as expected, but sometimes a bug slips through and makes your code fail edge cases. In case of the question I linked, even the on-line judge thought it was working in order, which resulted in a bug report :-) | |
| Dec 28, 2016 at 17:56 | comment | added | Der Kommissar | Example of a question that can stay open even with bugs discovered: codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/147192/… | |
| Dec 28, 2016 at 17:53 | history | answered | JamalMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |