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A user posted a question asking, "What does this code do?" (along with a code snippet). There was nothing in the question to indicate that the user did any research or otherwise exerted any degree of effort in understanding the code.

What reason should I select for my close vote?

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  • 5
    Lack of research is a downvote reason, not a close reason. Sometimes no close reason really fits and the better option is talking the asker into describing what they think the code does and changing the question to "Am I right? or "Where did I start to misunderstand?"
    user4581301
    –  user4581301
    2024-04-20 18:00:05 +00:00
    Commented Apr 20, 2024 at 18:00
  • 1
    @user4581301 I have been misled.
    Cardinal System
    –  Cardinal System
    2024-04-20 18:01:31 +00:00
    Commented Apr 20, 2024 at 18:01
  • 10
    That said, if someone's dropping a like a hundred lines of code and asking what it does, you have a good case for needs focus.
    user4581301
    –  user4581301
    2024-04-20 18:01:53 +00:00
    Commented Apr 20, 2024 at 18:01
  • 1
    Gotta disagree with Jeff in the general case, and in the specific case of the questions in the link, neither had a significant content edit and both are still open 13 years later, though one sent a bit of time closed. Someone who needs clarification on a few lines of code, that's one thing. Clarification on a couple dozen lines or the whole program is a different matter and almost certainly needs focus or clarification highlighting the few lines causing trouble.
    user4581301
    –  user4581301
    2024-04-20 18:16:28 +00:00
    Commented Apr 20, 2024 at 18:16
  • Typically needs focus on what specific thing they're having trouble understanding.
    khelwood
    –  khelwood
    2024-04-20 22:57:49 +00:00
    Commented Apr 20, 2024 at 22:57
  • 2
    2011 Jeff Atwood didn't necessarily have a top-notch understanding of what he had created, or its true value, or how to make it work optimally. Neither did the Meta community of the time. It's taken a while to understand what really makes good questions good and bad questions bad.
    Karl Knechtel
    –  Karl Knechtel
    2024-04-21 00:41:03 +00:00
    Commented Apr 21, 2024 at 0:41

1 Answer 1

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If the question is barely more than 'What does this code do?' with a dump of an entire program, then they are essentially expecting answerers to go though the program line-by-line and explain what each does. That is asking too many questions at once, so I would vote to close as 'Needs more focus.' The question would be better off explaining attempts to find out what the code does to narrow down on the parts they do not understand, and/or split up into multiple questions about multiple parts they do not understand.

However, if a question is asking about one particular statement or construct or maybe even a function with a specific purpose, and elaborates that they are not familiar with a specific syntax used for example, or how specific hard-to-read computation would play out, the question would be reasonably scoped and should be left open. This example is a well-scoped question because they are asking about a specific macro with a specific purpose, that can be explained in a reasonably-scoped answer.

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    That example question isn't even about the entire macro (pair of macros, really), but specifically the :-!! construct.
    Karl Knechtel
    –  Karl Knechtel
    2024-04-20 23:45:44 +00:00
    Commented Apr 20, 2024 at 23:45

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