When a question breaks the rules and is removed, staff's current process is to:
- close it first (so a reason is given),
- wait two days (so the person/ other people can see what happened), then
- hide the post (so it no longer appears in navigation/ search engines).
Are people happy with this process? I ask because occasionally, a lot of rule-breaking questions are posted at once (like what happened just now), and they end up taking space in navigation for hours.
My opinion is that PokeBase would be much nicer to browse if these questions were hidden immediately. We can still write reasons by closing the question then hiding it immediately after, and people can still see what happened using 'My Updates'. Is this better?
We would still use the close feature in situations like:
- Archiving old threads, i.e. stop new activity without pulling the whole post from public access. Especially helpful for meta.
- Some old posts with good answers get lots of low-quality answers from new users. If those posts already have good answers (which won't be outdated) then we can close the question.
- We can make an exception in certain cases, e.g. if there's a duplicate question where the old answer is incorrect/outdated, we can use the new thread to advertise that the old one needs an update.
- Questions which break modern rules, but are still accessed regularly, and we'd gain nothing from hiding.
(@staff I think I brought this up once before, but I wanted to hear other people's thoughts on it too.)
