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Why questions get closed

Stack Overflow allows for the community to collectively decide which questions are not suitable for the site. We strongly suggest that you read and understand the full list of reasons. Listing them briefly with links to advice from Stack Overflow:

While you might not agree with these criteria, they do encourage high quality questions and answers. It’s part of the reason why the site is so highly ranked in search results, and has been immensely helpful to programmers for so many years.

“Needs more focus”​

The formal definition of this reason for closure is:

This question currently includes multiple questions in one. It should focus on one problem only.

The obvious resolution here is to limit yourself to a single question in your post, and instead post once for each separate question. This ensures that a question has a clear purpose and is helpful for others with the same question in the future.

However, in practice, many questions are also closed with this reason if it asks a very broad question. Consider the following question:

How do I implement a live chat feature for my website?”

The fact of the matter is that this is an extremely large task that could not possibly be answered in the format provided by Stack Overflow. Not only that, but there are a countless number of possible solutions. This is a topic for an in-depth tutorial. Stack Overflow is not a place to ask questions that can only be answered sufficiently by a tutorial. Your question should be clear and specific, and you must show that you did research and attempted a solution. This question has none of those attributes, and will be closed.

“Needs detail or clarity” and “needs debugging details”​

These close reasons are very much preventable, and this site (overflow.tips), is offered as a resource to help you avoid closures for these reasons. If your question is closed with one of these, we suggest spending time studying the section on writing a good question, especially the advice on how to create a minimal, complete, reproducible example. If you follow all of the advice there, your chances of getting an answer go up dramatically.

“Opinion-based” and “seeking recommendations”​

It’s worth knowing that Stack Overflow absolutely is not the best place to seek help if you know you have a question that could be closed for these reasons. However, there are plenty of forums that do allow them. Reddit is one good choice - there are subreddits for many technologies, frameworks, and products where you can get generalized advice and opinions. You should also look for chat rooms, such as Slack or Discord, for any technologies that you work with. There are certainly people there who are happy to engage in general discussion and give you opinions.