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This is my question

https://superuser.com/questions/13258/whats-the-best-simple-clipboard-manager-available

It has 21 upvotes and 13 answers, the best has 19 upvotes. I have been a member of stackoverflow since about 6 months after first beta, this is a question and set of answers that makes the internet better, close it sure to prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added, but delete it, why?

Sure its a recommendation question and perhaps I shouldnt ask for the best one, but I looking for a specific type of clipboard manager which i wont find if I just type 'best clipboard manger' into google. I got the answer I wanted and anyone else looking for a simple clipboard manager would also find this useful, but now its not available anymore because its been deleted.

This has been here for 4 years and because some moderator want's to spend his time cleaning up the internet he decides he is going to delete a perfectly good post becuase it doesn't match up with the letter of the rules.

I've done my fair share of closing questions on stackoverflow.com and so know all about bad questions and people giving out when there question is closed.

This is a fine intelligent useful question which makes the internet better not worse and it should not have been deleted.

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    I would also like to point you to slant.co in case you haven't seen it yet.
    – slhck Mod
    Commented Aug 22, 2013 at 20:32

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close it sure to prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added

This is a good sign the question is open ended and simply asking for polling. We explicitly discourage these questions, for various reasons. I won't go into the details of why, as you seem to understand the reasoning behind this.

delete a perfectly good post becuase it doesn't match up with the letter of the rules.

I would argue that if it does not comply with the current rules, it is not a perfectly good post. It might have been on topic at one point, and of course it got a lot of votes and views in the meantime. That is great, and I can understand that the question has value to you.

But our rules have changed, and we cannot let questions similar to this stay on the site forever, just because they had some merit back then, but degenerated into a list of answers open for polling—and you even agreed that we should "prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added." With such a question, you would always get new answers or people adding their two cents, but even if there were a new useful answer being added, how could it ever compete against a four year old 20-something scoring post?

Users seeing such questions will draw traffic to our site for the wrong reasons. They would take it as an excuse to ask similar ones. We've had these problems during the period where lots of these kind of polling questions were still not closed and not deleted. Telling users that their question is off topic while another one can stay just because it is older was not a good plan to follow.

Sure it could be seen as useful by a large number of people, but not useful to our site specifically, and the mission of Stack Exchange sites as a whole. We cannot possibly keep such questions around forever, sorry.

With that specific question, typing "best clipboard manager" into Google does in fact lead me to the same answers you found, by the way. As also mentioned in one of the deleted answers:

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    I think the more relevant pragmatic point here, which you did not directly state, is that, once the question is closed, the information within will languish. Certain of the programs being mentioned will have their websites taken down as the developer closes down operations, and other programs will go from being free to non-free or vice versa, or completely change their purpose and functionality. We could keep editing peoples' posts with the latest info, but that would be too great a maintenance burden if we allowed these types of questions.
    – allquixotic
    Commented Aug 22, 2013 at 19:59
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    It also prevents the genuine addition of new entries into the answer list when you close the question, so if you want the question to be shown as a bad fit for the site (and thus closed), you're effectively limited to listing the number of programs that were present in the answers at the time it was closed -- unless you want to just have one canonical answer with a bulleted list, but still... that kind of thing belongs on other sites, because there's no knowledge content in that information; it's just pointers to other sites.
    – allquixotic
    Commented Aug 22, 2013 at 20:01
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    I think with the massive, practically effortless capability of modern web search engines, merely finding a website containing a piece of software is no longer knowledge. It's so trivial and easy to do that it's not any more knowledge than it is to read the From: address off of a mailed envelope. SU (and SE in general) is a repository of knowledge that does not simply involve pointing to random bits available on the internet. Still, the histrionic side of me wishes this were left on the site just for giggles, but the logical side of me says it's fine to kill it.
    – allquixotic
    Commented Aug 22, 2013 at 20:02
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    Thanks for sharing your perspective, @somequixotic. Indeed, it's incredibly hard to perform "maintenance" on these kinds of questions, especially once they have become closed. Adding a new answer, it would take forever for it to "float" to the top as well. I personally am not a big fan of historic locks, showing off old questions just because they could be useful, but at the same time telling users never to ask a similar thing. This would have been the only option, but given the quality of the answers here, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me here.
    – slhck Mod
    Commented Aug 22, 2013 at 20:24

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