It happened to me several times that a question closes while I am answering. It may sometimes be more than an hour wasted. I would expect not to be the only one to whom it happens.
Could there be a way such that someone who is working on an answer gets warned of impending closure of the question, and get a delay of an hour to complete somehow whatever he is writing, at least as a temporary answer to be completed by editing.
One might think that the system is right in not encouraging posting answers to questions that will be closed. I do not believe that since deleting of a question (as opposed to closing) will depend on the quality of the answers as well as that of the question.
For one thing, good answers to a bad question may be an incentive not to vote deletion. Furthermore, the system itself discourages deleting questions with upvoted answers, as "the number of delete votes required scales to the number of votes on the question and all its answers."
Hence, while on can undestand some motivations for closing a question, there is no strong reason to waste work already done by a user. And maybe let the community be the judge of it all. After all, that is what voting is for.
This can be discussed at length, but the weirdest part is that the system is rigged to give "a 4 hour window in which you can still submit your answer, even though it is already closed.". That is indeed more than I ask for.
But the the "post your question" button is disabled, without waiting for the grace delay, so that it is not usable ... unless one knows how to hack the javascript, it is said.
Why this inconsistency?
