Often people who come here and say they need urgent help really are in the right place, because they don't need urgent help.
Serious Urgency
Suppose someone needs help quickly because:
- They need to know if they took their life-saving medicine this morning, and have forgotten their password.
- They need to format a document properly to meet a court-ordered deadline in three hours; if they do not, their client will be convicted of a crime.
- They need to assess the security of their Ubuntu server; if it has been compromised, their revolution / military operation / doctor's office has leaked information to people who should not have it and they must act immediately to mitigate the harms.
While we can help them with the technical problems, they have not come to the right place because they need faster help, given by someone with an established legal or cultural duty to them, preferable under confidential conditions.
If we ever see something like that, we should remind people that we cannot accommodate their genuinely urgent needs.
Another reason we're not an appropriate resource for those situations is that, under those situations, it's likely we'd be (wrongly) relied on as a sole or primary source of assistance. They should be seeking the right kind of help with the time and effort they're using to ask us.
Since, in most cases, we can still assess the usefulness of questions to the community, we can still sometimes edit and keep these questions, like with other sorts of problematic questions.
If there's a question separate from the urgency, we can usually keep it.
If someone asked, "I want a BitTorrent client with a web-based interface so I can download Album X," and Album X is unlikely to be available this way without violating copyright, we can remove the reference to Album X, remind them that it's their responsibility to know the copyright laws that apply to them, and answer the modified question if doing so will create the sort of Q&A we want on our site.
Similarly, if someone will be fired in one hour unless they can set up Basque spell-checking on the command-line, we should answer the part of the question that's a question (rather than a plea for urgent help). We might take more than an hour to answer the question. That's OK. We're not just answering for the benefit of the OP.
If the urgency is the question, we should close it as too localized.
If someone asks for immediate help removing an embarrassing digital photograph from an Ubuntu One account to which he has forgotten the password (and which might actually belong to an American opera singer), we cannot help him at all.
We could potentially close his question as a duplicate of a canonical question about resetting Ubuntu One passwords, but problem is too localized.
A cyber attack in progress would be a similar too localized situation.
Not-So-Serious Urgency
Suppose someone needs help quickly because:
- They need to get LaTeX installed so they can finish an important draft of their dissertation in two weeks.
- They need to fix Evolution so they can send a follow-up "thank you" email after a job interview, within an optimal time window.
- They need to solve a problem with a release upgrade, so all their workstations are upgraded before the release they're running goes EoL.
- They need to free up space on disk so they can edit some video they took this morning; the earlier it's done, the better.
Here, the faster their problem is solved, the better for them it is, but this is a common degree of urgency, when seeking help from volunteers on the Internet.
Furthermore, in these situations, they are likely searching the web, looking elsewhere, asking their friends, maybe even posting elsewhere. We're not going to hurt them by trying to answer their question.
(We should still not consider ourselves bound by any deadline in doing so, of course.)
TL;DR
If it makes sense without the urgent part, it's basically OK.
