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This is something I've been thinking about for awhile, and finally prompted to officialy ask it because of this question...

It's fairly common for someone to post to SE saying, "Standard feature ABC isn't working." This type of question can really only have one of three types of answers:

  1. "You're doing it wrong, try XYZ instead."
  2. Turns out to be a bug in Craft.
  3. Turns out to be an error on the user's part.

It's the #3 situations that I'm focusing on here...

When the "bug" turns out to be on the part of the user, how should these questions be resolved? Closing as a "bug report" kinda makes sense, but that's technically reserved for the #2 situations. It's common enough that an error can be traced back to a typo, or an odd server configuration... how should those threads be handled?

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    I vote we add a new PEBCAK reason for closing.
    – Brad Bell Mod
    Feb 21, 2015 at 17:26
  • Only half joking, of course.
    – Brad Bell Mod
    Feb 21, 2015 at 17:26

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I think handled on a case by case basis. Questions that don't have long term value would be nice to close. We can add a new reason called "user bug" and file them there. Other questions still might be valuable to folks because the error message helps them troubleshoot their own bug. For those, we should encourage the question poster to post their fix as an answer and select it as "correct". If they post the answer in a comment and don't return to put it into an answer, there's no reason we can't move the fix to an answer ourselves.

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A lot of my posts could be closed with an RTFM warning, and I stumble on similar "user error" questions that can still be helpful when I've gone down the same path.

I think it's a case-by-case problem where there will be a mix of valuable and poor/abandoned posts that both fit into your #3 scenario.

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