When flagging a post for being off-topic, the following options are given:
- Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic. A list of these references can be found here: List of general references
- Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: About single word requests
- Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.
- This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network
What about the other cases that are mentioned in the FAQ On-topic/Off-topic List? The Off-topic List contains the following categories that it is not currently possible to flag for:
- Naming, including programming
- Literary criticism, discussion, and analysis
- Writing advice
- Translation/non-English languages
- Jokes that do not rely on the English language
Personally, I have not (in the six or so weeks I have been an active contributor) come across any questions that deal with the latter two; but the former two especially are quite frequent. I always want to flag these questions, but find that I cannot, except through the hack of “it needs ♦ moderator attention”, writing the actual reason in a comment box. This seems rather inferior to me.
Without knowing how the moderating system works, I would imagine that the whole point of having such a fine-grained flagging system is that it enables significant automatisation of moderation processes in the ‘already defined option’ cases, whereas the “it needs ♦ moderator attention” cases by definition require more attention and work.
So would it not make good sense to be able to flag questions as off-topic for all the reasons mentioned in the off-topic list, rather than just a (seemingly random?) extract of them?
