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Regarding this post:

How to detect use of std::string short string optimization?

Very clearly a question looking for a technical solution, but it was posted as Advice instead of QA, so it can only receive comments but no answers.

Is there any way a moderator or someone else with reputation can change this? Or will the poster have to delete it and repost it?

Going forward, how about tweaking the UI so when a new post is being created, the user is made aware of when to use one type of post over another so they don't make this kind of mistake again?

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    Note all those replies that appear to be comments are actually answers in the system and have "/a/" links to them. The UI is confusing and currently there are no way to add real comments to these posts. I also think maybe it should be reported here instead but putting forward a standalone feature request may also have its value. Commented Nov 2, 2025 at 2:34
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    @WeijunZhou "... no way to add real comments to these posts" Well... it is possible ;) [this is not an endorsement of using SO Q&A to post test content] Commented Nov 2, 2025 at 9:40
  • @cocomac Thank you. Maybe I should have said "no obvious way" instead. Not to mention the comment is not displayed at all if you look at the question. Commented Nov 2, 2025 at 9:43
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    This has also been my main observation so far with the "open-ended question" feature: most of the ones I've seen should be normal questions, because they have objective factual answers, but they were posted by new or low-rep users who probably don't understand the difference between the question types. It is indeed very annoying because the "open-ended" format works poorly for factual questions, and as mentioned there is no way to convert them. Commented Nov 2, 2025 at 15:39
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    Maybe it would help if low-rep users could only post open-ended questions by going through the Staging Ground, where experienced users could assess which question type is most appropriate before approving. I'm not sure that a brief explanation in the new question UI would be sufficient. Commented Nov 2, 2025 at 15:42
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    @NateEldredge: That's been the case for all four such questions I've seen in the tags I monitor (assembly, cpu-architecture, atomic, x86, etc.) with one of them being marginal because it's asking about number of physical CPU register vs. architectural, so not about programming directly. Being an advice question or not doesn't change whether it's potentially off-topic for that reason (I'd say not, but some others would.) The UI is overall a lot worse for these kinds of questions, and this is one of the problems the community predicted when this feature was announced. :/ Commented Nov 2, 2025 at 18:33
  • The OP has now posted this as regular Q&A stackoverflow.com/questions/79807432 but is poorly received (-2 currently). I'm not entirely sure why; maybe it was the commentary/responses that they copy-pasted from the original "advice" question. I also don't know what the exact reception was on the original question (but it was +1 total). Regardless, there probably should be some advice on how exactly to repost questions as Q&A. It's understandable that OP doesn't want to lose previous context, but it's not clear (even to me) how best to do that. Commented Nov 3, 2025 at 9:25
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    @cigien I speculate some of the downvotes are because of topic: "How do I make my incorrect code run okayish by detecting some implementation-details" is not well-received because many will feel like the correct/helpful response to anything like that is "This is UB, don't do it! <link to explanation of what that means>". There are tons of these questions in C and C++ and even though they are not technically duplicates or bad questions, they are not really novel either. Commented Nov 3, 2025 at 10:34
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    @julaine That wouldn't explain why it was well-received as an "advice" question (since the question was the same in both cases). Lots of comments on the original post suggested to make it a regular Q&A, and the feedback on this meta post says the same. If the "correct" approach is to take a well received "advice" question and make it a poorly received Q&A question, just because it's technically Q&A, something is very wrong with the system. Commented Nov 3, 2025 at 12:14
  • @cigien It was never an “advice” question, just mistakenly submitted as one. That doesn’t necessarily make it a well-posed regular question. That it suffers from the “unviable proximate goal as a poor substitute of the ultimate goal” problem doesn’t fundamentally change its nature as a “how to solve a specific programming problem” question. Commented Nov 3, 2025 at 21:57

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At the moment no, they can't be converted/migrated; either from opinion based post to "traditional" Q&A or vice versa. This will change in the future, and work is being completed by the developers allow migration both ways. I don't know how that is likely to look or function or when it would be available.

For now, unfortunately, the "recommended" method is to suggest that they repost the question and delete the old one.

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    Given that creation of a "traditional Q/A" requires the asker to select "Debugging/Troubleshooting".... ALL GOOD QUESTIONS are going to be (improperly) created in the new format. Commented Nov 3, 2025 at 16:32
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    That's separate feedback that should likely be its own feedback, @BenVoigt . I do agree that only "Debugging/Troubleshooting" being an option for traditional Q&A isn't ideal; there's no option to "How to?" questions, which make up a large portion of questions out there. Commented Nov 3, 2025 at 16:35
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    People have already left that feedback 1 2 3. I mentioned it here because it explains why the particular post that's the topic of this meta question got misclassified. Commented Nov 3, 2025 at 16:39
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    "For now, unfortunately, the "recommended" method is to suggest that they repost the question and delete the old one." -- I ran into this trap. I tried that, and SO wouldn't let me post a new question as Q&A because it autodetected it as a duplicate of the old question. I had to trick SO into thinking my new question was different, and then editing the text to restore my original question. Please disable this new disastrous feature. Commented Nov 3, 2025 at 19:22
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    @JasonS: That's probably worth raising as its own bug report; IMO, the duplicate checker shouldn't be blocking one question type as a duplicate of a different one. Commented Nov 4, 2025 at 15:58
  • Yes, please change this. A post should not be blocked for being a duplicate of a deleted post, especially one that the question asker deleted. Commented Nov 4, 2025 at 18:10
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    @BenVoigt Don't be ridiculous; debugging/troubleshooting questions earned Stack Overflow its reputation and there are tons of good questions of that type. That's the most helpful kind of question for a Q&A site to have. Commented Nov 4, 2025 at 18:20
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    @TylerH: No, the "I want to understand something" questions are the only good questions. "I want to understand something I found during debugging/troubleshooting" is fine, and probably includes the "tons of good questions" you are thinking of. There are then a handful of good "I want to understand how to debug/troubleshoot" questions, and an overwhelming number of "Help me fix this, you do the debugging/troubleshooting because I don't understand how and don't want to". The latter got nuked for the first years of SO's history (when SO earned its reputation) but now those fill the site. Commented Nov 4, 2025 at 18:31
  • @BenVoigt "You do all the work" is a small subset of all debugging questions, as your follow-up reply acknowledges on its own. Commented Nov 4, 2025 at 18:56
  • I do not consider "I want to understand something I found during debugging/troubleshooting" to be "a debugging question". Commented Nov 4, 2025 at 19:01
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    @V2Blast done.... meta.stackoverflow.com/a/436433/44330 Commented Nov 4, 2025 at 20:52
  • I want to delete and repost this question as normal Q&A, but I cannot delete it and I'm not allowed to repost because the system detects it as a duplicate. stackoverflow.com/questions/79819444/… This seems like really bad UI design. :( Commented Nov 13, 2025 at 22:41
  • With some editing I managed to repost correctly, but I still cannot delete the original incorrectly categorized question. Commented Nov 13, 2025 at 22:45

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