Why was the question too vague?

Question

I'm reasonably new here but wondered why this question got put on hold?

The OP asks for a review of the code he had provided as the answer to another post on this site. (He includes a link to the original post.)

His request seems to fall within this discussion of what is a code review and I would think that critiquing aspects of the code such as formatting, comments and naming do not require a detailed explanation of the purpose of the code. And ,in any event, the description can be found in the linked post.

Looking at his code, there are a couple points I would suggest that would/might improve the maintainability of his code.

Answer 1

I was one of the users that voted to close this question.

First and foremost I did this not because the "question" was actually unclear. Basically closing the question as "unclear what you're asking" on this site is impossible, since any question asks for a codereview of all aspects by definition.

Lately we've begun using "unclear what you're asking" as a crutch to close posts that have too little context to be meaningfully reviewed.

While providing code is the first and foremost requirement that a question needs to fulfil, it's extremely important to provide additional context.

The question here is not much more than a dump of large blocks of code with an explanation that's three (extremely shallow) bullet points. Quoting directly from the question:

• Sheet1 - CodeName aIndex: used as the main reference to the structure of the data being processed on the other 2 sheets, mainly mapping of column headers, and some static data.

• Sheet2 - CodeName bImport: this where external (raw) data is imported before processing

• Sheet3 - CodeName cFinal: where data from bImport will be transferred during processing

This is not saying anything about what the code actually does, what the goal is.

In summary this question IMO cannot be answered in it's current form, because the purpose of the code is unclear, which is sufficient reason to put a close-vote onto that question.

Answer 2

I was also one of the users that voted to close this question.

We have no trouble with long questions on Code Review. We do have trouble with questions in which the purpose (AKA context) of the code is unclear.

That question is one wall of code, with comments about what each function does. However, there is no notion of why it does that and why it's relevant. Although that's a mistake often made with comments, it does in this case invalidate the question for Code Review.

If you want us to spend a lot of time reviewing your code, you should at least tell us why it's used and what for. Code exists to solve problems. If you don't tell us the problem, we don't know what good code should look like either.