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So I saw this question pop up today and took a look. After looking it over I felt that it should be closed because I feel like the question is really asking for relationship advice between the poster's wife and father. So I went to close it as off topic and I only had a couple choices:

  • "Asking for shopping assistance" - nope
  • "Medical advice" - nope
  • "Belongs on another site" - not that I know of
  • "Blatantly off-topic" - maybe?

Since I am used to StackOverflow I am used to more specific reasons for closure, ie. this question is off-topic in this specific way (ex: you've asked for debugging help but haven't provided any code, please provide some code so we can help). I feel that that is more helpful to me in communicating to other community members and the poster what is wrong with the question and how it can be improved. "Blatantly off-topic" feels like the catch-all reason for when nothing else fits. I know I could just flag it as blatantly off-topic and leave a comment but I feel like that would turn the comments into a discussion on whether the question is on-topic or not and would prevent useful comments about the question from being read (we would end up with a low signal to noise ratio).

So do we need a close reason that is something like the following?

This question appears to be asking for relationship advice. We welcome questions about relationships that relate to parenting and raising children. This question is off-topic because advice for how to handle relationships where a child is not involved is not within the scope of acceptable questions.

(I know my wording is not great, but I will leave it to the wordsmiths of the world to come up with something better.)

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    While the question linked seems to be more about family relationship, on every parenting discussion/forum/hanging with parent friends, it seems that relationship with the grandparents eventually come up, usually in the context of disagreement over feeding or discipline or - well everything. Managing the relationship with your own parents or in-laws after you have children seem to be an integral part of parenthood. (That said, the question you linked is not formulated that well)
    – Ida
    Sep 16, 2014 at 22:25
  • @Ida I agree that parenting definitely involves relationships with grandparents and decisions / conflicts over parenting choices. In my mind I distilled that question down to "My wife and father had a fight / misunderstanding / whatever. How do I get them to kiss and make up?" The fact that the conflict arose over a parenting issue seems tangental to the question he's asking.
    – Becuzz
    Sep 17, 2014 at 13:51

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I don't think this is needed. We don't get all that many relationship questions, and the ones that are blatantly off topic we can just use the generic off topic close reason for. I've been on this site for a while, and I've seen less than a half dozen questions like this.

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