Actually, some of the points in Evans answer deserve consideration, and should be clarified in any guidance that gets created, even if we disagree with his conclusion. Perhaps it would be better to just move the comment threads to chat and disengage from discussion with Evan on this matter since that is unproductive.

@JakeGould, I understand where you're coming from. But, the question is about closing questions on pre-release software (site policy issue) and proposed action (historical basis). The purpose isn't to to convince Evan of anything or to engage in discussion with him. That's a tangent and an outcome. The fact that he doesn't agree, and the resulting discussion was unproductive, shouldn't be a basis to close the question itself. That won't stop discussion, it will just block any new answers. The recent one by music2myear provides valuable insight. (cont'd)

Well darn, if you ain't right! I'm being mooned by my own badges.

Excellent answer. One observation: in this case, the questions were from rediscovery of known problems, and the answers were reposting of solutions found at the developers' site; the threads were duplication of content that already existed where it should. The question becomes what is the value of duplicating it here. We often say that this site isn't intended to replace or compete with Google when basic information already exists elsewhere and we're not adding value to it here. Evan's ROS questions don't contribute new knowledge, they just house it at an additional location.

@EvanCarroll, I posted an answer to try to clarify some of your perceptions about the process here, get into more detail about topicality, and address some of your points.

Thanks. You saved me some decision-making on the last two questions, and probably avoided some arguments and bad feelings.

On the Meta site, upvotes and downvotes indicate agreement or disagreement. So far, 1 person agrees and 6 disagree. The disagreement is likely because this would be covered by [tags], there is already perhaps too much granulation. and many [tag-cleanup-request] questions involve proposing new tags, so it would add to tag bloat.

I find a screenshot is usually best. It's compact and readable. Some users say to post data as data, not as a picture of data, because it is easier for readers to replicate. However, using table generators that make it pretty introduces a lot of noise that is often more work to clean up that just reentering the data.