My concern, while related to another answer, is the timing of such things. I have seen many times in the past on others', and again today even on an answer I gave, a near-rabid rapid descent of the vultures on putatively bad questions.

But where does this put users who don't have time to just check their inbox every five seconds? In this particular case, it was an absolutely brand-new user, and within one hour the question was closed, even though mathematically it was a very reasonable one and I didn't see any obvious dups (though as an occasional user I did not use EVERY one of the search tools above).

If the people wishing to close it had really cared about the user learning math (what I thought we were here for), they would have looked up what an NFA was and given suggestions for how to improve the question. As I saw on another meta post somewhere (and I'm sorry I couldn't find it now, it was a good one), if you don't know what the tag is about, maybe you should wait to let the hammer fall.

In any case, it seems to me that there should be some additional guidance in this question above for how long to go before doing close/delete votes. I understand there should be a way to remove truly bad questions quickly, but the editors here are meanwhile nearly as zealous as Wikipedia ones - and that's not necessarily a good thing.

My concern, while related to another answer, is the timing of such things. I have seen many times in the past on others', and again today even on an answer I gave, a near-rabid rapid descent of the vultures on putatively bad questions.

But where does this put users who don't have time to just check their inbox every five seconds? In this particular case, it was an absolutely brand-new user, and within one hour the question was closed, even though mathematically it was a very reasonable one and I didn't see any obvious dups (though as an occasional user I did not use EVERY one of the search tools above).

If the people wishing to close it had really cared about the user learning math (what I thought we were here for), they would have looked up what an NFA was and given suggestions for how to improve the question. As I saw on another meta post somewhere (and I'm sorry I couldn't find it now, it was a good one), if you don't know what the tag is about, maybe you should wait to let the hammer fall.

In any case, it seems to me that there should be some additional guidance in this question above for how long to go before following through on close/delete votes. I understand there should be a way to remove truly bad questions quickly, but the editors here are meanwhile nearly as zealous as Wikipedia ones - and that's not necessarily a good thing.