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https://money.stackexchange.com/users/40527/melissa-yue-wallace?tab=questions

This user has asked 12 questions about income tax in Canada in the last 16 hours or so. Most of them are referencing specific pages in a specific book from KPMG.

Assuming the benefit of the doubt (that this isn't somehow a shill for the book), I feel like the flood of questions is not going to be helpful for anyone. It's hard to even think about wading through them all and providing helpful, detailed answers (unless there's a Canadian tax accountant out there with a day or two of spare time on their hands). I am concerned that they're just going to age off the page and the user will be left helpless - and the questions will just be white noise taking up space on the until then.

I can vaguely remember a few times when we've had a flood of detailed, book-related questions like this in the past, but I can't find any examples after a few minutes of searching. Do we have a standard response for this? What's the best way to help a member with a wide range of very precise questions?

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    It is getting close to the end of the fall semester...
    – shoover
    Commented Nov 30, 2019 at 2:54

2 Answers 2

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I agree they're unlikely to get decent answers en masse. I also feel the questions are quite specialised and not likely to be useful to anyone else unless they happen to be reading exactly the same book and have exactly the same set of problems with understanding it. They'd be better questions if the ratio of quote to original text was lower - e.g. if there was a bit more discussion of what exactly is hard to understand, and the quotation was more selective.

That said, I can't think of a reason they would actually be off-topic, and at least one of them did get an answer. So I'd be inclined to just vote on them as you would any other content and otherwise just move on. Eventually the unanswered ones will probably get cleaned up anyway.

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    +1 Agree! “Too specialized/localized” is not a close reason, nor is “unlikely to get an answer.” Just upvote the ones you like, downvote and/or edit the ones you don’t. No need to close unless it is unclear or off-topic.
    – Ben Miller
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 0:15
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    Thanks for formulating an answer. I think this pretty much describes how I felt about them.
    – dwizum
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 13:56
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Assuming the benefit of the doubt (that this isn't somehow a shill for the book)

It isn't. I'm not affiliated with KPMG or authors. I just read this book and have questions.

I feel like the flood of questions is not going to be helpful for anyone.

This book is mighty popular in Canada.

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    Hi Melissa - just to clarify, I wasn't inherently looking for a reason to discredit, close, or otherwise respond negatively to your questions, I just felt they were outside the norm of the typical patterns we see here and I was wondering what the best way to respond was.
    – dwizum
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 13:57

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