A question I asked was recently closed by five fellow users. I found the moderation particularly harsh and off-putting, and as a moderately-involved Stack Overflow user, I want to understand whether I should use similar judgement as the basis for my own moderation.

I recently asked what I would consider a fairly simple, in-scope question for Stack Overflow. Here's the original version:

Is there a way to display a plot next to text output in a single graphic using par(mfrow=c(1,2))?

I'm trying to display ROC curves (first plot) alongside a coefficient table (second "plot") inside a single graphic.

Also, I know this can be done with ggplot2. I'm wondering how one would do this using the built-in graphics library.

Within minutes, another user answered my question. Someone even upvoted the answer. Later today, I went back to reward the user with a green check, and I noticed a landslide of people had voted to close the question:


From my perspective there are two issues with this decision:

  1. This is not a debugging question. My question--how to print a text block as a plot--is akin to asking how to print (to paper) a nicely-formatted data frame.
  2. As a new R user, I have little ground to build an example, particularly since I actually had no idea whether it's even possible to create a plot of text.
  3. The question did have a clear problem statement. How else would have someone answered it correctly and receive an upvote within the first hour the question was posted?

So here are my questions:

  1. Do we expand "This is not a debugging question" to include any questions without a code snippet?
  2. Do we expect users to present code for non-obvious, small tasks that they have no idea how to accomplish?
  3. Should I ignore the existence of "correct" and "useful" answers as part of closing a question?
  • 5
    I don't necessarily agree with the closure, but I can't sanely determine if this question is that good to begin with. Kinda on the fence here. Maybe you could edit your question to make it come across as less of a debugging question to head off that crowd. – Makoto Nov 8 '17 at 20:31
  • I see this close reason used on "write my code for me" questions. I have no idea where the line is, but this should not have been closed. – Nissa Nov 8 '17 at 20:33
  • 2
    Man, that is frustrating. I agree with @StephenLeppik. Since, you didn't try it yourself first using the documentation, there is really nothing to "help" with or correct. To me, the question sounded like one of those "tl;dr the docs" questions that frustrate me but honestly it could have just been glanced over too fast. Sorry this happened to you. – Dan Temkin Nov 8 '17 at 22:30
  • That last sentence killed it. I have no idea whatsoever why SO users think it is useful to put such completely irrelevant info in their question, it is a pretty common problem. All it ever does is antagonize the reader. Instead of trying to explain it to unreceptive ears, let's tackle this the other way and turn this into a teaching moment. Please edit your question to explain why you thought it was necessary to pad the post with it. – Hans Passant Nov 9 '17 at 8:10
  • 2
    @HansPassant Why is it irrelevant to say I want to use the standard library as opposed to a third-party package? – fny Nov 9 '17 at 15:11

I don't agree that closure was the best idea.

However, you could improve the question using the following:


Awesome. So you have code to work with. Its the version that uses ggplot2.

Put that code into the question and there's your example. At this point you've provided the full mcve and have ammunition against that closure reason.

  • 1
    Ha, I like the way you put that last sentence. – BoltClock Sep 17 '18 at 16:45

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