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I would like to understand why the Community/Moderators close answers without any sort of feedback to the user.

I appreciate that not all answers are great or elaborated enough but sometimes these are quick answers to help people. I think that's better than nothing to be honest.

For example, my answer to this question was ranked negatively (fair enough - I responded from my phone during a meeting to help the user but I didn't elaborate enough). Today I log in to revisit my answer and not only I don't find my own answer but I find -100 rep because it has been closed (of course no reason from the Community). OK, the answer wasn't good but, I would have expected some feedback in the same way I see comments from moderators posted on some pretty bad questions/answers asking to elaborate further or improve.

My question here is: Can the Community/Moderators add a brief comment/reason for closure? I know we have some guidelines but we could add a link to the specific reason to assist the user in preventing the same behaviour in the future.

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    Hi MON4KO, I flagged it as spam. The answer undoubtedly has good information in it but it does look like an advertisement for Rally. The answer has been undeleted and comment added so it can be cleaned up if you'd like to.
    – Mark Phillips
    Oct 26, 2014 at 23:14
  • @MarkPhillips The answer's been revived, but it's still locked by Community. I flagged it so it could be unlocked, but thought I'd comment here to let the OP know what's going on. :)
    – Todd A. Jacobs Mod
    Oct 27, 2014 at 1:03
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    @CodeGnome I went ahead and unlocked the post. It's now open to comments and editing. M0N4K0, thanks for bringing this to meta.
    – jmort253
    Oct 27, 2014 at 1:26
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    Thank you all, really appreciate your support and guidance. I will update my post and prevent similar responses in the future.
    – M0N4K0
    Oct 27, 2014 at 7:40

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The Community Account is Automated

Community♦ is a system account, not a person. Issues with how that account functions should probably be brought up on Stack Exchange Meta instead of here.

Your Post

I'm not a moderator or an op, so I can't tell you exactly how your question was scheduled for deletion, but I can shed some light on why it was closed. It was deleted about 15 hours ago with the following reason:

This answer was marked as spam or offensive and is therefore not shown - you can see the revision history for details.

Anyone with enough rep to see deleted answers can see this message, too. If I had to guess, I'd suspect it was the link to Rally that caused your post to be flagged.

Analysis and Advice

The answer looked spammy, and while a careful reading of the quote and link in context of the question wasn't really off-topic, it didn't really answer the question directly, either. It really read like a product advertisement for Rally, rather than addressing the issue of when/if one should ignore WIP limits. At best, it was a "How would I do that in Rally?" answer, which wasn't the OP's question at all.

That said, I myself wouldn't have flagged it as spam, and I'm not sure you deserved to lose 100 rep for it. Whether or not there's anything that can be done about that at this point, other than treating it as a lesson learned, is a separate question for the diamond moderators.

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    This is really helpful @CodeGnome, thanks for the explanation. I understand that rather than provide some sources for the user to read and resolve his most urgent concern my post seemed like I was advertising Rally. It's a good point actually.
    – M0N4K0
    Oct 26, 2014 at 22:05

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