Reasons to close

Question

I was trying to flag this question as off topic. Recall the Help Center says

However, please do not ask questions about

• Undergraduate-specific issues that could not apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians
• Suggestions or recommendations for a university, journal, or research topic (a "shopping question")
• Preparation for a non-academic career ("What graduate degree will help me get a job as X?")
• The content of your research, rather than the process of doing research

and this particular question (at least the main question in this post) is about the 3rd point. Here are the options to select for flagging something as off topic:

• Questions that cannot be generalized to apply to others in similar situations are off-topic. For assistance in writing questions that can apply to multiple people facing similar situations, see: What kinds of questions are too localized?
• Questions about problems facing undergraduate students are off-topic unless they can also apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians as described in What topics can I ask about here?
• This question appears to be off-topic because it seems to seek specific advice for a very specific situation, and it's likely that only someone with a good understanding of your situation will be able to provide an objectively correct answer.
• Blatantly off-topic (this question has nothing to do with academics)
• This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network

I didn't feel that any of these options really get to the heart of why it seems to be inappropriate. (If I'm wrong, please let me know which one does, and why.) Is there a reason they don't quite line up with the off-topic topics listed in the Help Center? If not, is this something we can address by adding more options (I have some vague impression that we have a limited number of reasons we can list, but I don't know if this is true or what the limit would be)?

Answer 1

I am going to ignore whether the prompting question is on topic or not, as I do not think it is particularly important. There are a couple of things going on here.

The first relates to differences between flagging and voting to close a question. Users with more than 3000 rep can vote to close questions, while users with less than 3000 rep (and more than 15 rep) can only flag posts for attention. When flagging a post, there is a reason of "should be closed", which gives an option of "off-topic" that leads to our three predefined reasons. There are differences between flagging and voting to close one of which is that when voting to close, in addition to the off topic list, there is an "other" box that is not available for flagging. I am not sure if this is by design or not (it might be worth searching and/or asking on the meta.SE).

The second issue is that we are limited to 3 custom close reasons so adding one essentially means removing another. We can do that, but we need a proposal of what to say. Something like New custom close reason (but also listing which reason to remove). Have only three predefined reasons is not a huge deal since users with enough rep to vote to close can vote with a custom reason. Users who only have enough rep to flag, can simply flag it as "other" an leave there reason. That said, in general, if it is not one of the predefined reasons for closing, it might be cleaner to let someone with more rep vote to close because as mods, we tend not to like to unilaterally close borderline questions. That said, by being limited to 3 reasons it means there are differences between the help pages and the flagging/closing pages.

The third issue, and probably worth a separate question, is do we want to reword

Preparation for a non-academic career ("What graduate degree will help me get a job as X?")