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Sometimes, a question pops up which can not be answered by the community. These questions are often aimed at the developers of a certain plugin/framework.

Yesterday I encountered one of those questions. To answer this question you need certain knowledge only available to a small group of developers; those working on Polymer. Today, I flagged it after reading the OP's comment.

However, I was unsure how to flag it. None of the options really covered this situation. Thus, I flagged it for moderation attention adding the following note: This question can not be answered by the community, only by the Polymer devs. Should not be asked on SO or any other SE site. As I was semi expecting, this flag was declined.

How do we flag questions which can not be answered by the community? Off-topic? Too broad?

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    That particular question seems like a future feature discussion, for which opinion-based is a good fit.
    – ryanyuyu
    Commented May 12, 2015 at 12:38
  • I disagree. The OP asked 'is this planned?', which you can't answer with "In my opinion it's planned"
    – Bassdrop Cumberwubwubwub
    Commented May 12, 2015 at 13:03
  • It's still an open ended discussion that can be answered like "No, because <opinion>" or even more likely "probably because <opinion>"
    – ryanyuyu
    Commented May 12, 2015 at 13:21

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I was the moderator that declined the flag, because closing posts when they are off topic is something the community can handle directly.

In the general case, you could point to this Meta question: Why we're not customer support for [your favorite company], and vote / flag to close the question for one of the standard options or even with a custom reason.

What you did not mention in your flag, however, is that there was a bounty on the question, preventing the community from closing the post. That would have been worthy of moderator attention here. I've now removed the bounty and closed the question for you.

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    I wonder when SE will get around to making the bounty on flagged questions obvious in your flag queue...
    – Deduplicator
    Commented May 12, 2015 at 13:03
  • Thanks, also for the sake of confirmation; This was a very specific example. But future unanswerable question should just be flagged as off-topic with preferably a comment left as to why it's a bad question?
    – Bassdrop Cumberwubwubwub
    Commented May 12, 2015 at 13:04
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    @Bas: Yes, if the community can handle it (though the comment only if it's worth it). In your case, your other-flag just omitted the crucial information "bounty".
    – Deduplicator
    Commented May 12, 2015 at 13:07

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