These ideas are probably tangentially related, but because they fit well along the tone of this meta post, I'll add them in:
Please don't VTC because a question is poorly formatted
If you are inclined toPlease don't put put a close vote just because a question is poorly formatted, it's a big NO! Consider. Consider editing the OP's question instead to make it clearer. After all, the CV queue has an option to "Edit""Edit" the question as well.
Even after making the edits, if the question still misses out one or more fronts (too broad/opinion based/low-effort/etc.), then do feel free to VTC it. However, if you're too busy to edit, just skip the close vote/vote Leave Open, but please, don't VTC just based on the formatting.
Mithoron made a good point that editing a question forces it out of CV review queue, so we should avoid trivial edits if the question is already hopeless (for example, homework dumps should certainly not be edited.). However, VTCing just based on the formatting should beif there's a big NOmajor edit that could possibly save the question, then we shouldn't hesitate in doing that. Also note that this has been discussed on Meta.SE before, and that once the question is edited, it is also bumped to the front page, and any additional close votes will put the question back into the queue, with the previous close votes intact.
Please don't VTC because a question is easy and got answered in comments
This does happen quite a few times. This may appear nice to some, after all, you helped the OP get the solution even if their question did not belong to our site. However, this has quite a few bad implications:
- users will assume that even if they post poorly formatted questions, it would get answered by someone
- users' content won't produce any future value, as it will be Roomba'ed (automatically deleted) a few days later
- users might face an unsuspecting question ban (they don't really know a question ban exists until they actually face it)
If we spend five minutes writing a 400OP's easy question first receives two-character commentthree comments pointing them in the right direction. And then the homework CVs, etc. start being applied to athat question, why not spend five more minutes and write an 800 character answer to their query?as discussed in the main post above. So, if you're inclined to put a close vote for this reason, please don't!. Instead, bookmark that question, and write an answer later. And do vote Leave Open.