@somequixotic There's good reasons for those. Voting is something restricted for new users to make sockpuppets nontrivial. Comments don't bump, so that's an avenue for spam. Embedding images in a post is potentially very dangerous (a lot of us browse at work, school, etc., and images can easily be NSFW or even completely illegal, with no warning). All require very small amounts of rep. The differing levels are a little weirder, but I suppose it's one way to keep people interested - the thrill of 'unlocking' things.

Just be careful with copying into Google. Firstly, SU itself often ends up being the first Google result very quickly - we are ranked quite highly. Secondly, and more importantly, Google customises results based on your past usage. What might come up as the first result to a developer may be some ways down the page for someone who spends their time searching for cooking tips!

Firefox has had a fairly good track record of displaying Unicode characters where it should, instead of boxes (beats Chrome from my experience, not sure about IE). Perhaps it's recognising that there shouldn't be anything displayed? This is all speculation.

Yea, that's a bit weird. SU also does define a font via CSS (Trebuchet MS being the default, I think) - I guess that would explain OS X at least. Otherwise, it will eventually fall back to browser-defined fonts (sans-serif), which will vary with browsers. I'd expect those browsers to remain consistent across OSes, but perhaps not. Also, from my limited testing, both the default and the final (Firefox) fallback fonts should display it (there's also some "liberation" and "dejavu sans" fonts I don't have and can't test). Maybe it's actually being displayed via Windows' font fallback mechanism.

Nope. Confirmed that it's more a font thing and certain OSes just happen to use those fonts in certain places.

And a third note: we have confirmation that it's a Win7/OS X thing. Perhaps it's the drawing APIs being used. I'd personally consider not rendering anything to be the correct behaviour here, however.

A side note to the side note: this only occurs on specific machines (or maybe OSes), at the moment. Those same browsers are confirmed not to render anything on at least two Win8 machines.

Not sure about notifications (that could get old, fast), but it would be nice to have a list of questions linking to the one you're viewing, e.g. on the sidebar (there's currently already a Linked section for questions the one you're viewing is linking to).

@Ramhound We understand that here, with the context this question provides. However, I'm worried that adding a broadly-worded reason to the standard close reasons, which does not have this context, may cause issues down the line - as it is currently worded, this reason could be applied to other perfectly good questions.

I'm a little concerned about the wording. A lot of open-source projects (and some closed-source) are in a perpetual state of pre-release, with no concrete plans to move to release. It is not inconceivable that bugs may have third-party solutions, or what one sees as a bug another sees as a feature. And bugs are not exclusive to pre-release software, especially not release candidates. (Another point is we should be careful about having a listed close reason - leaving it for custom reasons may be a better idea to reduce bandwagoning, especially where a question may be answerable.)

There is one exception. If you self-answer and accept your own answer, that answer is not raised to the top of the list. Instead, it remains in the vote sort order.