If you have earned the privilege of closing questions, then the reasons to flag questions include:
- the user has edited away important details of the question, so the question needs to be marked for Mathworks to restore
- you see something borderline about content that you want to get a second opinion on
- content that is excessively harsh or is inappropriately personal that should probably be edited, if you do not have the privilege of editing it yourself. Sometimes even positive remarks can be inappropriate, such as if someone is being told they are attractive.
If you see duplicate questions then the aim would typically be to leave the oldest version that has meaningful contributions to it. If multiple versions have meaningful contributions, then my recommendation would not to flag as duplicates, but instead to post cross-references between them. If the meaningful contributions are only in the form of comments, then if you get enthusiastic you could choose one version as the one to keep and copy the comments to that one version (with attribution). If multiple versions have Answers, then my recommendation would be not to flag, but to instead cross-reference and tag with "duplicate question requiring merging". (Not that we have the ability to merge questions yet, but some day...)
Questions that are irrelevant to MATLAB / Simulink / Polyspace / Mathworks should generally be closed, unless they have had meaningful contributions. In particular, closing such a Question that has only Comments might be appropriate, but once it has a meaningful Answer then we try to avoid closing the Question.
Questions that are pretty much just copies of an assignment, with no meaningful contribution from the poster other than perhaps "How do I do this?" are fair game for being closed as "unclear" unless they have attracted meaningful responses.
Questions that come down to the person expecting the volunteers to do all of the work are more borderline. The more explanatory effort the poster puts in, the less likely it should be that the Question should just be closed.
If a person posts just asking for source code for some general topic, then the question can usually be closed as being unclear. If a person posts just asking for source code for some specific topic (perhaps giving the name of a paper, for example), then it is borderline: it could be valid to close the question, or to just leave it sit, or (if you are feeling enthusiastic) to do some checking and post related resources. Sometimes you will end up guessing as to whether it is a student wanting someone to do their assignment for them (close it), or if it is a researcher who is hoping that someone might already have implemented a paper or tool that would be useful in their work (professional courtesy might be to leave it open.)
There are a couple of important exceptions to the general policy of not closing questions that have an Answer:
- Questions that are effectively cheating on exams. These questions are candidates for outright deletion rather than even just closing -- because just plain closing would still allow the person to access whatever innocent reply might have been made
- Questions about cryptography are potentially out of bounds due to the strange USA laws about discussions of cryptography. Precedent says that hashing such as SHA-1 is not cryptography, especially when used to authenticate a sender or that a message has not been tampered. Because of that, "watermarking" or "steganography" strictly for the purpose of authentication is not considered cryptography. But the boundaries on "watermarking" and "steganography" get blurry very quickly; I suspect that a bunch of the steganography posts could be considered over the line in a strict reading of the laws. But if, for example, someone asks for an implementation of 3DES or assistance with coding of it, then that is something that Mathworks cannot host. Typically closing is sufficient for cryptography questions.
