This is a hard problem and I’m glad you are approaching it from the viewpoint of how to be helpful of people asking for help and respectful of the time and effort to properly answer a question.
It’s trivially easy to write “I am stuck doing X - HELP!” and it’s hard to look the other way when you know some version of 20 questions or basic troubleshooting might get to a question that can be answered, but that this situation is almost certainly not refined enough for someone to answer directly.
In the past, people felt they needed to close questions where a quick search gave an answer, and I think we’re all in agreement we want these - and we want an answer that shows how to search, why to search, and how to use the answer.
On other sites, there are some excellent guidance like MCVE on Stack Overflow in an effort to combat poorly researched and documented code questions.
What I see you pointing out are questions where the asker hasn’t isolated the issue or documented why they can’t self-research an answer or way to troubleshoot.
If that’s the real issue you see, we have the beginnings of a close reason for the “lacks basic troubleshooting” and the proper way to handle these is a -1 vote if the question is not useful or not clear. A constructive comment if there’s really no way to do the work for someone.
About the only way to answer these questions is if Apple has published how to troubleshoot the issue and you could answer - here’s a framework to isolate what’s happening, please ask a follow on question once you’ve done the work to isolate the issue to a specific error or one step in this troubleshooting guide.
I see your question to be really about us helping people feel more comfortable closing questions for the off topic reason:
Questions must demonstrate a reasonable amount of research & understanding of the problem being solved. Please edit to either a) clearly describe your problem and the research done so far to solve it or b) include attempted solutions plus why they didn't work. In either case, be sure your expected results are clearly presented.
Do you see any examples of questions you are uncertain to vote to close using the above reason when they are really lacking basic troubleshooting?
Lastly, don’t confuse Help Vampire with rules of thumb. If troubleshooting is really a manifestation of someone exhibiting symptoms from this post - just walk away from that post and disengage.
So if I were to categorize certain questions you might be tempted to close:
- Can you do my debugging / troubleshooting for me? - bad - Vote to close if research and results aren’t up to community standards.
- Can you search for me how to solve a specific clear issue? - good - Answer with where to find the answer and possibly how you found that or what knowledge let you connect the dots.
- Can you do my thinking / homework / work for me? - bad - Vote to close if research and results aren’t up to community standards.
- Can you read my mind (or an XY problem)? - bad - You may have to think how to vote / answer this, but in the end, if we could read minds, wouldn’t we be out making millions of dollars and then retiring on the beach spending money on friends and family?
