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There have recently been some questions which have been closed for, I think, good reasons related to the likely intent of the person asking them inferred from the narrative pushed in the question itself.

Some of those questions, if asked with better intent, do have good and (again: I think) useful answers. And in particular I have an answer waiting for one of those closed questions which could be useful for later reference.

What should I do about this if I don't want to discard the answer? Is it appropriate to ask a question on the same subject simply for the purpose of providing an answer?

Note I'm not interested in the reputation: just that I think the answer is useful and would otherwise be lost.

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    $\begingroup$ It's always OK to answer your own question; please ask & answer away. $\endgroup$ – Organic Marble Feb 27 at 15:00
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    $\begingroup$ @OrganicMarble: thanks, that's what I've done. $\endgroup$ – tfb Feb 27 at 16:13
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    $\begingroup$ Agreed, nicely done too! $\endgroup$ – uhoh Feb 28 at 2:41
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To me, a Stack Exchange site is a collaborative effort to generate good answers to on-topic questions, and to make those answers as visible and accessible as possible to future readers.

Working toward that end while following rules and guidelines and accepted norms of a given site is just what we should be doing.

There was a series of problematic questions that are getting down voted and closed and this was one of them.

For closed questions that have or can have good answers, we usually try to salvage the question rather than post a new version; that's the norm. But there can certainly be exceptions when the original question is part of a bigger problem that needed to be addressed in a rigorous way.

So in this particular case I agree that it is best to start afresh with a clean, unencumbered question and to post a clean, unencumbered answer to it, and in this case the answer is a very high quality answer so that the steps taken to improve its visibility to future readers are both appropriate and advised.

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    $\begingroup$ One thing I don't know: for a salvageable question which has an acceptable answer, is it possible for people with sufficient privileges to essentially acquire the question from the person who asked it and forcibly accept the answer? I'm not asking this because I want my answer to any question accepted, but because looking for accepted answers is one proxy for looking for correct / useful / high quality answers. $\endgroup$ – tfb Feb 28 at 11:40
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    $\begingroup$ @tfb no. This comes up from time to time but only OP has the power... It might be possible that moderators can but I doubt it, and even if they did, they probably wouldn't. OP decides, because it's a hold-over from "that solved my problem" back when questions were problems in Stack Overflow. But you can post a new question here in meta or search the main meta for a definitive answer. $\endgroup$ – uhoh Feb 28 at 11:43
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    $\begingroup$ OK I will have a search. I think that would tend to support reasking questions which have potentially good & useful answers but which are encumbered in various ways (as has recently happened, obviously), so the good & useful answers can be spliced onto the unencumbered questions. Thank you. $\endgroup$ – tfb Feb 28 at 13:40

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