Why aren't Tour de France riders going any faster?
Looks like a discussion to me. If I had asked this last year....Neil and Freiheit would have knocked this off.
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It does not meet our quality standards.
This is an excellent question, and I'm glad you asked. (even if the automatic quality filters thought it was too short)
I view the main duty of a moderator as dealing with flags and supporting the community on the site. Often that can mean being the "designated bad guy" who closes or deletes something that people flagged, without any mention that the flags ever existed. If nobody flags a particular post, I may not even see it. I do look at a lot of the questions, but not all of them.
I think that it is a "forumy" question that's asking in a way that tends to encourage discussion more than answers. It's exactly what the "not constructive" close reason is there for.
If I'd seen the question before it had any answers, I would've been very likely to intervene (comment suggesting changing to a more concretely answerable question, edit it into one myself). If I'd seen it before there were any answers and it had a couple votes to close and a flag request to close, I would've closed it.
By the time I did see the question, it was a day or two after it was originally asked. I briefly contemplated some sort of intervention (closing?), but there were some decent answers. Good answers can save a borderline question.
And more importantly, there were no votes to close the question and no flags on the question. (there were flags on a couple chatty comments that we deleted, though)
So, because of the good answers, no votes to close and no flags, I left the question alone.
If our community wants that question dead, I'd support that. If somebody wants to rewrite the question to be more constructive without invalidating the answers, that would be totally awesome and I would definitely support that if it needed my support.
If you believe the question should be closed, vote to close it as "not constructive".
You say that we would have closed that question in a heartbeat. You may be right; when the site was in beta and all we had were pro-tem mods, we were very quick to close what we perceived as bad questions.
The role of pro-tem moderator is, in my opinion, somewhat different than the role of regular, elected moderator. In addition to performing the duties of moderator (as defined by freiheit above - dealing with flags, guiding users), a pro-tem mod should guide the site towards something that can be launched out of beta. I believed this meant that we should prune bad questions.
Now that we've had elections and there are three mods who've been given mandates by the community (they've been elected based on the platforms they ran on), a moderator is here to be a human exception handler. Except for the most egregious questions, which this is not, following the lead of the community is, I think, appropriate.
In short: The mods have your back, but the community has to be part of that. How to make that happen is another issue entirely.
