Abandoned close reason instead of no-repro?

Question

Recently, I've noticed a lot of old abandoned questions (for example, this one with two CVs) being closed as no-repro.

This seems rather unusual, given the fact that the primary issue is that these questions are just too old that nobody will be able to actually do anything about them. The OP doesn't seem to care anymore, and has simply abandoned the question.

I can sort of understand why this issue is no-repro (nobody wants to download an old version of Ubuntu to test, especially when said version is EOL), but the fact is that issue still may be reproducible. No-repro should (at least to me) be reserved for issues that are actually impossible to reproduce.

That brings the question as to why we don't have a close reason specifically for these abandoned questions. Would it make sense to add a reason for this (or enable RolandiXor's old close reason)?

Answer 1

There used to be an "Abandoned" close reason. That was ultimately switched out with a different close reason, and to my knowledge we'd need to remove an existing close reason to make room for the "Abandoned" close reason.

I don't see a way to replace "no-repro" with an "Abandoned" close reason, because technically an abandoned question could have been a "It happened but never happened again so I could never reproduce it", in some cases.

Answer 2

Is this abandoned or just old and unanswered? The question looks okay though. If it's not possible to answer "How do I restore the default Ubuntu theme?" even for 14.04, we have bigger problems. There's almost certainly a duplicate for this. If there isn't, there should be.

That brings the question as to why we don't have a close reason specifically for these abandoned questions.

Because purposefully finding and closing abandoned questions is a complete waste of time.

Update: I've talked on this before but this is still contentious. If you disagree with me, please have the courage to comment and explain what value you perceive from chasing 2y old questions out of the system.

It's gut-wrenching to still see mature members of the community creating more work for themselves and other reviewers. Just let the old stuff be. It doesn't hurt us until people start churning it up. If it's a problem for the system, the system will automatically delete it.

This question is a great example of time wasted:

• An edit bumped it to the front page.
• The editor then close-voted.
• That spurred a review queue entry that sucked in four more people.
• One of those people has since close-voted (separately, I think).
• And now we're here talking about it on Meta.

I know it's hard to accurately talk about opportunity cost when talking about time, but consider what those people could have done in that time. Leaving off the Meta —which does have disparate value— we're talking about 5-10 minutes of answering, voting, editing on some of the posts that came in today.

Everybody involved here does great things for the site so I'm really not having a go at any of you... But we should all be conscious about the work we're creating for other people, and balancing that against the benefit of what we're suggesting.