Why was my question closed? [Collected Answers]

Question

Let's use this meta question to collect the already-vetted explanations of common reasons for questions to be put on hold. The intention is that you'll use a comment (suggested here) to link to a specific answer here when voting to close in an applicable situation, if nobody's already done so.

Because we're going to be linking here and many readers won't already be meta regulars, please don't add lots of comments to the individual answers here. And please don't answer here to propose something; there are separate meta discussions of several close reasons or risk factors, and this post is intended to collect the final results of those.

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Here are some comments you can use, with links to these answers:

Too broad -- too many questions

Asking multiple questions in one is not recommended as it makes it hard to answer with a concise and focused reply. Additionally it becomes much harder to rate answers as to whether one is better than another as the "best" answer to each part of your question may be held in different answers. See [tips on how to fix the problem](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/3364).

Answer 1

Too broad -- too many questions

Your question was put on hold because it asks too many questions, which makes it hard to answer with a concise and focused answer and makes it hard for the community to rate answers that address only some of your questions.

Tips on how to fix:

• Separate your question into multiple questions. In general we recommend asking one question first and then writing follow-on questions based on the answers to that. Feel free to link from one question to another.

• A common format we see if an introduction to the world followed by a list of multiple questions about that world. Make sure you look at each of those questions and consider whether it is substantial enough to have a good answer written about that alone. If so break it out into a separate question, ideally linked back to the first one. (Do make sure that each question can stand alone; people might encounter them in any order.)

It's not always wrong to ask more than one question together. If the questions are strongly related and reasonably well constrained, so people wouldn't have to write a book to answer, then it's probably ok. If the community put your question on hold as too broad, however, you probably need to either break it up or constrain the questions more.