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You can flag it for reopening (but you need at least 3k rep IINM).


I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Apparently, SO community is trained for years to close vote every question they don’t understand.

Once I was really motivated to reopen a question. It was an interesting question, it had 2 well written answers, one of them mine. Also it was from a new user account.

I’ve spent hours trying to get or reopened, wrote questions on meta, wrote many more messages in chats, edited the question so I’m 100% sure it fits the site.

It got reopened, then closed within days, with the exact same reason “too broad”. https://stackoverflow.com/q/57323981

This discouraged me from answering questions on that site. I don’t do web development, I don’t program Java, JS or Python. But the majority of SO community are web developers. The questions I find good and interesting, they find too broad and unclear what’s asked.


Man, that's a super interesting and very specific question! Wish I had enough rep to apply to reopen it.

I suspect the "too broad" closers wanted it to ask re a specific programming language. But of course in this case the asker didn't care what language they'd have to write it in (although they helpfully tagged the most likely C++ and C#).


Indeed, very interesting question. That’s why I spent some time trying to reopen.

I happen to have experience DLL injecting into dwm.exe’s swap chains. AFAIK it’s the only way to get frames in VRAM for hardware encoding of desktop video on Win7. Desktop duplication which provides same data through officially supported API was only introduced in Win8, while desktop compositor runs on GPU since Vista (usually, i.e. when Aero is enabled). I didn’t need to process frames, just copy to another texture in VRAM shared with my capture process, which encodes them with media foundation. But the same DLL injection approach can be used to process frames in real time like OP wanted, by rendering extra pass[es] before each IDXGISwapChain::Present().


> I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community.

Actually, that's _exactly_ how you change the attitude of the community, by making your voice heard. Sure you as an individual aren't going to override everyone else, but if you don't voice your opinion then your complaint about other folks loses some of its ground.


I answer questions on SO mostly for fun. I find it entertaining to answer hard questions. Sometimes I learn interesting things while I write an answer. Other times people post interesting comments to my answers. Flagging, appealing closes, and other BS politics is not fun at all.

Unfortunately, over the last couple of years consensus, policies, and/or something else has changed. The questions that I find interesting to answer (hard ones, and related to my area of expertise which is desktop development, 3D graphics, SIMD, CAD/CAM and a few others) are now either too broad, or unclear what’s asking. A few times the close voters closed the question even before I’m able to write an answer.

I’m probably too old and too lazy to make my voice heard. Apparently, web site owners now want SO to specialize on web development, and on deadly boring questions about it, like “how do I format date and time in PHP”, where an answer can be found within 2 minutes of using a search engine. SO is not my personal web site. If that’s what owners want, so be it.




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