<p>Some excellent and thoughtful comments in existing answers from long-standing members still leave a little scope for additional remarks, from the Dark Side if you will. </p>

<p>Some respected colleagues here seem to be leaning towards an <strong>ideal of indefinite courtesy</strong>, namely that people posting poor questions may require and deserve support until their questions have been rewritten as acceptable and that it's our duty to provide that so far as we can. </p>

<p>I don't vote for being rude (who does?), but I vote for being firm and for spending time and effort in ways that promote the best long-term interests of the site, which pivot on building up a core of well-posed, well-answered questions. </p>

<p>I don't buy the obligation to indefinite courtesy as a matter of practicality. We have guidelines on the kinds of questions we support, which over time have shifted and which in the future may be changed again. But at any one time <strong>many questions are just off-topic and/or poor</strong>. Sometimes people just have not read the advice in the Help Center. Sometimes people are just trying to outsource their homework -- or even more frequently their basic thinking on Master's or research projects -- to the internet. Sometimes people are just naive or inexperienced and can't see that their question is not even barely answerable. It's not really a question of blame, although some questions do  deserve the quick closure or the lack of answers they get. Poor questions don't help the forum's long-term goals. In fact, they dilute the forum with fluff and flab. That's the nub of it. </p>

<p>Any policy has to be tempered by practicality, not least the fact that people are busy and have other things to do. <strong>I don't think it's an especially good use of the time of people of high reputation</strong> (~10K, ~100K) <strong>to be writing the same kinds of comments again and again to explain to people why they've posted rather poor questions.</strong> We are not a help line on which every caller must be answered. If we don't explain that well enough, we need to revisit the documentation. </p>

<p>I don't claim to be consistent, because I share in the conflict of motives here. Sometimes I just vote to close, half-hoping that someone else will explain directly to the OP why there is a move to close. Sometimes I add a comment myself. It's really hard to get the balance right, because often explaining the (sometimes several) reasons why a post doesn't pass muster is likely to appear hostile rather than supportive. </p>
