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I feel like the customer relationship close reason is perhaps getting a bit overused lately.

IIRC, it was originally meant for questions e.g. about customers not receiving a deposit on an account or trying to recover access to their account. In other words, questions about the state of internal proceedings of a company. Naturally, such topics cannot be answered by people that don't have insight into the company's internals, and thus they would be a bad fit for our site.

However, lately, I've seen some questions e.g. about configuring Bitcoin related software, interactions with APIs, or using services more generally get closed under the same reason. At least some of these questions were about publicly accessible information, might be of interest to more users, and could easily be answered by a more experienced user.

I'd therefore like to propose we do not use the customer relationship reason to close questions like this one: Do I put password for slushpool.com using GUIMiner?

What do you think?

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I agree that closing the question you mention might have been stretching it. Maybe we could change the wording so that if the question is exclusively about the relationship between the author and a company that has some form of customer support, it is off-topic. That would make questions about interfacing open source software with a company API on-topic.

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  • That seems like a good idea, and yes, I'd agree that interfacing with a company API should be on-topic as long as the issue is replicable for other users. – Murch♦ Oct 4 '17 at 21:14
  • I agree with this. Questions that can really only be answered by customer support should be the only ones that are closed. – Andrew Chow♦ Oct 11 '17 at 2:08
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I agree to an extent, I think the questions like that are being closed because the knowledge is too specific to a single company and so is both hard to answer for most users with no experience with that particular company, and less useful for others in general because of its specificity. But yeah the example you linked is probably pushing that idea a little too far. If questions are left open though, there's a likelihood a lot of them will never be answered anyway I think, but that becomes less of a problem as bitcoin.SE grows

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  • It's not a big issue if some questions remain unanswered for some time. We have automated processes that clean up questions that don't get attention. Otherwise they just remain available to be answered. – Murch♦ Oct 2 '17 at 23:14

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