What should I do with questions that were refused by the community, if I have found solutions for them? If the question was closed as not constructive, does it mean, that the community thinks that this question should not be answered, because the answer is not interesting or should be not published?

My question is inspired by single case: I have asked how to deal with big dialogs in PrimeFaces: PrimeFaces with big dialogs - how to do this correct?. I've suggested that the actual behaviour is the bug because the application would be unusable for people with small screens, and I refuse the idea that dialogs should be used for yes/no questions only. The question have been ignored (almost no views), so I've started to develop the solution myself. When I've finished it, I've thought that it's a good idea to share with it with community. But the question was next day closed!

So, now I don't know, should I remove my answer and move it to my blog? If the question is unwelcomed, than the answers are unwelcomed too? Should I share with something no one wants here?

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As I said, read my answer here and figure it out why that happened meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/159711/… you should take a look to FAQ also... –  Mr. Alien Dec 20 '12 at 18:24
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1 Answer

up vote 4 down vote accepted


When a question is closed as "Not Constructive" it means there is no one right answer. Any answer will just be someone person's opinion.

It means that having answers to this question will cause more problems than it will solve because people will end up in endless debates over what answer is better when there is no objective metric for determining if an answer is correct, or which answer is "more" correct. Such discussions do not fit well in the Q/A format of the site and end up obscuring the potentially useful information in noise.

As for other reasons:

"Too Localized" means it wouldn't help anyone to have the answer, so there's no need to post it

"Not A Real Question" means that the question can't be answered as it states. It doesn't provide enough information to answer it, it's asking for too broad of an answer, it doesn't actually ask a question at all, etc. In such cases you should focus on fixing the question (these questions, more than any other type, can be improved to the point where they become good answerable questions). Until the question is improved there's little use in providing an answer.

"Off Topic" means that the answers wouldn't be relevant to the target audience, so you shouldn't be posting them here, consider finding a more appropriate site to post it on.

For "exact duplicate" just go to the question that your's was closed as a duplicate of and post your answer there, if you feel it has something to add to the existing answers.

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What are you saying "No" to? Should I remove my answer and move it to my blog? If the question is unwelcomed, than the answers are unwelcomed too? or something else? –  LBT Dec 20 '12 at 18:33
@LittleBobbyTables I'm saying no to the question in the title. –  Servy Dec 20 '12 at 18:36
If you think it's useful, post the question again with any changes suggested by any commenters and with the answer you found. –  Chris Gerken Dec 20 '12 at 20:26
@ChrisGerken The whole point of the question being closed is for the community to say that such answers aren't welcome, so that's exactly what he shouldn't do, and exactly what this answer is telling him not to do (and why). –  Servy Dec 20 '12 at 20:33
@Servy, but if a specific answer becomes available and can focus/change the question then that's OK. The whole point is to understand why the question was closed, fix it and then answer it. –  Chris Gerken Dec 20 '12 at 20:57
@ChrisGerken for a "Not a real question" that can be the case, as I explained in my answer. For that case you should figure out why the question couldn't be answered, fix the question so that it's appropriate, get the post re-opened, and then post your answer. Posting an exact duplicate of your previous question just to answer it before it gets closed again would be abusing the site. In this case though, the question was "not constructive". Such questions can very rarely be edited into appropriate shape; they are inherently asking for something that can be answered, but shouldn't be. –  Servy Dec 20 '12 at 21:02
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