Post History

Closing questions should be a last resort. Closed question are wasted opportunities to get more interesting and useful content, and potentially wasted opportunities to gain a new contributing user. When someone takes a chance on a low activity site like CD currently is, they are doing you favor. If the first reaction they get is people with a condescending, unhelpful attitude telling them to get lost... That is a great solution to the problem of "we have too many users, too much growth, too much good content".

Self answer are an even easier decision. Once we know what the answer is supposed to be, it is easy for *anyone* to edit the question and improve it, which also teaches the new user how to improve it. People helping you learn the site is a much better new user experience.

Occasionally, someone posts a self answer that is such a tangled mess that there's no fixing it. IMO this is very rare, but okay, it happens. The linked question certainly isn't an example of that. It appears to me that the OP is trying to take a grouped sum of a filtered Cartesian product. He mistakenly used the term "cumulative sum", even though that's not it, that's his main sin. Hopefully he either edits the question or confirms in comments that he cumsum really isn't what he meant - though given the "warm welcome" he got I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't bother.

It's easy to quibble over minor things like a misused term. Meanwhile this is the first Spark question on the site, which is a very popular QA topic (82k questions on Stack!), and it's even a real world problem rather than a trivial hello world thing, so it can drive a lot of organic, quality traffic from search engines. Especially considering that the OP is knowledgeable enough to post an answer, and that an answered question is much more valuable for site growth than unanswered (it shows potential new users that there *is* a chance their question will get answered by someone, and they wouldn't just be screaming into the void). Regulars of the site should be helping this user improve his question through comments, rather than shouting him down.

Again, since when is our problem that we have too many users, contributing too much content? Was this site started because people got annoyed at how Stack sites are too friendly, and we desperately need a meaner, less welcoming place?