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Facts :

There are a couple of posts, here (on meta), from contributors wording their misunderstanding about the reasons that motivated the closure of their question for the reason that :

This question is likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts and citations. It should be updated so it will lead to fact-based answers.

When reviewing the close votes queue, I am often left undecided and just skip.
While agreeing that the question should be closed because it just cannot expect collecting any valuable answer, I just cannot find the appropriate reason for that and certainly not the opinion based one.
The most recent example.

That sort of question is IMHO no more no less likely to trigger opinion based answers than (as an obvious example) text processing questions for which numerous good answers will be posted, each one based on it's author preferred text processing utility. (no disrespect meant)

I make no doubt that this sort of questions should be closed for the reason that no good answer can be made because :

The answers would necessarily be workload dependent.
And this is an absolute reality that, apart from some very basic cases already well documented in RHEL / ORACLE / IBM… publications, no other member of the community will ever run the same workload in the same conditions with the same demands.

I therefore suggest to :

  • Either create a new item in the list of closing requests reasons of the like : "Workload dependent"
  • Or, if easier, extend the existing opinion based reason to "opinion based or workload dependent"

Of course happy to leave the precise wording to english natives.

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There's a few thing s to unpick here.

I think that a "workload specific" reason for closing would be wrong. There's no good reason why we should close workload specific questions in general.

Either:

  • the OP can narrow down which characteristics make their worklod unique.
  • Or there is a short (2 or 3) discrete list of options and the question is factually answerable for all. A single answer might be offered covering all.

So more appropriate would be "needs details or clarity", where the OP needs to narrow things down a bit.

Some questions are just unanswerable. For example performance tuning kernel parameters for an unknown task.

For those I'd go with Stephen Kitt's suggestion and write in a custom reason.

In effect these would be questions that do not supply enough detail, but in truth you believe it is impossible to supply enough detail because of the nature oft the problem.

Discussion on opinion based

These are the most tricky reasons to understand. All other close reasons we moderate the question not the answer. Yet for opinion based questions we (sort of) moderate based on potential answers.

Some questions are clearly trollish opinion seeking questions ("is mac better than windows").

But more commonly opinion based questions are only identified based on personal expertise. People with the right experience just know that some specific topics are rife with opinions and too few hard facts.

why was the linked question opinion based?

The linked question arguably lacks focus by asking about a bunch of different parameters in one question.

However the "opinion based" problem with it is there is:

  • too many possible right answers
  • insufficient detail to know the "right answer" for this OP
  • no good detail the OP could supply to narrow it down
  • Too many say-admins who'd be ready to argue their way is the best

Arguably the OP did nothing wrong asking here, but unfortunately there's no way to answer this without basically saying "I like these options".

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