When to change question to be on-topic

Question

Listen to what I mean not what I say

This question: Is there a way for grub to automatically reboot into Windows from Windows? came up on my radar today. I knew what the problem was but unfortunately the title wording "Windows from Windows" made it off-topic. So I removed the "from Windows" at the end. Others objected and rolled back the edit. Now the question might now be closed as "off topic" due to the Windows factor.

By the rules of AU I was under the impression you are allowed to edit a question to keep it on-topic. My answer then became (paraphrasing) "No Windows can't do that but Ubuntu can it this way...".

Complicating the issue, after I changed the title to not be Windows specific it was nominated for closure as a duplicate.

After this my edit was rolled back to make it appear to be a Windows related question again and another close vote popped up.

The people involved Muru, David and Zanna might all be considered Moderator Material so I'm feeling there is just something I'm not getting and would like to see a discussion outside the limited scope of the comment section under aforementioned link.

Plus I feel bad for the four rep point OP and what he/she might feel when logging in again and possible confusion whilst reading all the comments, many of which I'm a party too.

I'd really like to wrap my head around this business of editing a question to make it on-topic and then rolling back edits to make it off-topic again.

Answer 1

In general, please don't misrepresent what OP is asking or hide information to influence reviewers. If you want to champion the cause of a question and comments are not working, bring it to meta rather than fiddling the title/tags to make it look more Ubuntu-y or whatever. Let's try to apply the rules in a transparent way...

In the case in point, it seems that I am to blame for lazily voting for the duplicate, which has basically the same answer but, I realise on rereading, is about a different problem. Thank you for pointing that out. Somebody subsequently voted for my dupe suggestion, unfortunately, but I have retracted my vote and removed the comment.

Nobody else has voted that the question is off-topic. In general the question is getting voted Leave Open. You can cast the final Leave Open vote yourself. If readers of this Q&A decide that the question is off-topic and vote to close it, it can be migrated to SuperUser imho as it's a good quality question.

Answer 2

I'm with you, 100%.

The syntax of the question has thrown some people. There's nothing like the mention of Windows to raise people's hackles and influence their review outcomes, but again, I'm with you.

The problem is 100% about grub. The solution is 90% about grub. I don't think we're opening any floodgates by allowing a question like this to exist here. Interop is really important.

Edits that make that clear are fine. I think that's possible without changing what the OP actually wants, and that in itself is fine. I might even have a crack myself.

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Your answer has got better, but it is still a compromise from what the OP really wants. It'll result in always rebooting into what they last booted to, unless they intervene. That might be perfectly acceptable to OP, so it's a valuable answer to point out... But it's not quite the same.

I've added a half-answer that does do what they want but there's some dot-connecting they'll have to do on the Windows side of the problem. I guess it's possible for them to handle that in Ubuntu running on Windows but that's really outside my personal area of expertise.

But the question is fine.

Answer 3

Now that I have had time to think more about your answer, I don't think it will even work. grub-reboot explicitly does not set the boot entry to the saved one, it's a purely one-shot thing. So, whether or not GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true and GRUB_DEFAULT=saved, using grub-reboot like OP does will not make it boot to Windows once again after the next reboot. So, OP will have to:

• use the GRUB menu to boot to Windows to mark it as saved, instead of using grub-reboot
• use the GRUB menu again to be able boot to Linux

Meaning you have missed the point of using grub-reboot twice over! Instead of having to deal with the GRUB menu once when OP has to reboot Windows for updates, now you're forcing them to do it twice!

I would say I'd be surprised that the answer got as many upvotes as it did, but nope, it's a HNQ after all.

So, from what I can tell, not only have you posted an answer that won't work for the case OP describes, you then proceeded to edit the question to force it to be on-topic and then proceed to post long-winded comments multiple times on the post complaining against it being close-voted!

Sorry, I don't condone such actions.