There are some useful guidelines that can help you decide whether a question should be closed.

• Anything that is clearly offtopic or incomprehensible should be closed immediately.

• Bad-subjective questions have no place on any SE site. Refer users to Chat for discussion.

• Many (bad) basic questions can be closed as duplicate of one of our reference questions (or the whole list). These are good write-ups of general nature that should help the asking person to solve their problem and/or come back with a better question.

Reference answers to frequently asked questions

• We don't disallow questions on homework or exercise problems, but we have two demands: display of own effort and a specific question.

Homework policy
The return of the homework question
What to do when the answer is already part of the question

• Sometimes, questions are little more than a request to proofread a solution attempt. This is either out of our scope (original problems) and should be done by proper peer review, or the job of TAs (exercise problems).

What to do when the answer is already part of the question
Questions about correctness of a solution
How to deal with questions about crank-heavy topics?

• Questions that ask for lists of things rather than single answers are generally disliked on the network. Never mind that you find some on any site; most were created in early days because they attract many readers, but we have learned to stay clear.

What about list questions?
Our first list question

If you close, please post a comment explaining why; only then can the user learn what to change. You don't have to do much typing in many cases: we have a repository of standard responses for common cases of close-worthy questions.

There are some useful guidelines that can help you decide whether a question should be closed.

• Anything that is clearly offtopic or incomprehensible should be closed immediately.

• Bad-subjective questions have no place on any SE site. Refer users to Chat for discussion.

• Many (bad) basic questions can be closed as duplicate of one of our reference questions (or the whole list). These are good write-ups of general nature that should help the asking person to solve their problem and/or come back with a better question.

Reference answers to frequently asked questions

• We don't disallow questions on homework or exercise problems, but we have two demands: display of own effort and a specific question.

Homework policy
The return of the homework question
What to do when the answer is already part of the question

• Sometimes, questions are little more than a request to proofread a solution attempt. This is either out of our scope (original problems) and should be done by proper peer review, or the job of TAs (exercise problems).

What to do when the answer is already part of the question
Questions about correctness of a solution
How to deal with questions about crank-heavy topics?

• Questions that ask for lists of things rather than single answers are generally disliked on the network. Never mind that you find some on any site; most were created in early days because they attract many readers, but we have learned to stay clear.

What about list questions?
Our first list question

If you close, please post a comment explaining why; only then can the user learn what to change. You don't have to do much typing in many cases: we have a repository of standard responses for common cases of close-worthy questions.

There are some useful guidelines that can help you decide whether a question should be closed.

• Anything that is clearly offtopic or incomprehensible should be closed immediately.

• Bad-subjective questions have no place on any SE site. Refer users to Chat for discussion.

• Many (bad) basic questions can be closed as duplicate of one of our reference questions (or the whole list). These are good write-ups of general nature that should help the asking person to solve their problem and/or come back with a better question.

http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/q/599

• We don't disallow questions on homework or exercise problems, but we have two demands: display of own effort and a specific question.

http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/q/468/98
http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/594
http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/q/597/

• Sometimes, questions are little more than a request to proofread a solution attempt. This is either out of our scope (original problems) and should be done by proper peer review, or the job of TAs (exercise problems).

http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/q/597/
http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/519/
http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/109/how-to-deal-with-questions-about-crank-heavy-topics

• Questions that ask for lists of things rather than single answers are generally disliked on the network. Never mind that you find some on any site; most were created in early days because they attract many readers, but we have learned to stay clear.

http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/20/what-about-list-questions
http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/145/our-first-list-question

If you close, please post a comment explaining why; only then can the user learn what to change. You don't have to do much typing in many cases: we have a repository of standard responses for common cases of close-worthy questions.

There are some useful guidelines that can help you decide whether a question should be closed.

• Anything that is clearly offtopic or incomprehensible should be closed immediately.

• Bad-subjective questions have no place on any SE site. Refer users to Chat for discussion.

• Many (bad) basic questions can be closed as duplicate of one of our reference questions (or the whole list). These are good write-ups of general nature that should help the asking person to solve their problem and/or come back with a better question.

Reference answers to frequently asked questions

• We don't disallow questions on homework or exercise problems, but we have two demands: display of own effort and a specific question.

Homework policy
The return of the homework question
What to do when the answer is already part of the question

• Sometimes, questions are little more than a request to proofread a solution attempt. This is either out of our scope (original problems) and should be done by proper peer review, or the job of TAs (exercise problems).

What to do when the answer is already part of the question
Questions about correctness of a solution
How to deal with questions about crank-heavy topics?

• Questions that ask for lists of things rather than single answers are generally disliked on the network. Never mind that you find some on any site; most were created in early days because they attract many readers, but we have learned to stay clear.

What about list questions?
Our first list question

If you close, please post a comment explaining why; only then can the user learn what to change. You don't have to do much typing in many cases: we have a repository of standard responses for common cases of close-worthy questions.