It is nice you ask this in Meta because 1) I forgot to answer to your comment in the linked question, and 2) immediately after writing that comment I asked myself the same question :)

To 1) I am sorry, these are busy times.

To 2) I agree with walen that one week can be some reasonable amount of time: it gives enough time for the OP to come back and not enough for us to remember that question exists. However, to me the underlying idea here is what mdewey explains in this related question of you:

Leave a gentle comment and then wait. If the OP does not come back to clarify the post and narrow down the questions within a few days then the question should be flagged for closure as too broad.

That is: we are here to solve problems. If someone enters this site and has a question, it is his responsibility to express it in a clear way. We can help them to express it better, improve its format and many other things, but the core of the question is still theirs.

If they happen to just vanish, we have some options:

• If the question already has some potentially good answers, try to polish it to future readers.
• If the question does not have any answers, vote to close it.
• If the question does not have any answers and you feel that you can express the question in a better way, just ask a new one and the older will be marked as a duplicate of the new one. This has the feature of being able to have a full control over comments of other users to improve it, also to accept a good answer, etc.

As they say, *Spanish Language Stack Exchange is moderated by you*. We together can build a better place in the internet. It is our choice to improve things: if you do, tons of people (+10K every day!) will silently thank you. If you don't, please do not feel bad. So neither feel the urge to ask something the OP did not really ask, nor to clarify what others do not make clear.

As I once read in Stack Overflow:

Don't polish turds

The purpose of editing is to make a post easier to understand, and easier to find. If a post should be deleted, then flag to close/delete instead. Editing these posts is sometimes called "turd polishing" - no matter how much you polish a turd, it'll always remain a turd. Similarly, if a post is inherently worthless, it'll always remain worthless, no matter how much you edit it.

Instead, try to find hidden gems.

It is nice you ask this in Meta because 1) I forgot to answer to your comment in the linked question, and 2) immediately after writing that comment I asked myself the same question :)

To 1) I am sorry, these are busy times.

To 2) I agree with walen that one week can be some reasonable amount of time: it gives enough time for the OP to come back and not enough for us to remember that question exists. However, to me the underlying idea here is what mdewey explains in this related question of yours:

Leave a gentle comment and then wait. If the OP does not come back to clarify the post and narrow down the questions within a few days then the question should be flagged for closure as too broad.

That is: we are here to solve problems. If someone enters this site and has a question, it is his responsibility to express it in a clear way. We can help them to express it better, improve its format and many other things, but the core of the question is still theirs.

If they happen to just vanish, we have some options:

• If the question already has some potentially good answers, try to polish it to future readers.
• If the question does not have any answers, vote to close it.
• If the question does not have any answers and you feel that you can express the question in a better way, just ask a new one and the older will be marked as a duplicate of the new one. This has the feature of being able to have a full control over comments of other users to improve it, also to accept a good answer, etc.

As they say, *Spanish Language Stack Exchange is moderated by you*. We together can build a better place in the internet. It is our choice to improve things: if you do, tons of people (+10K every day!) will silently thank you. If you don't, please do not feel bad. So neither feel the urge to ask something the OP did not really ask, nor to clarify what others do not make clear.

As I once read in Stack Overflow:

Don't polish turds

The purpose of editing is to make a post easier to understand, and easier to find. If a post should be deleted, then flag to close/delete instead. Editing these posts is sometimes called "turd polishing" - no matter how much you polish a turd, it'll always remain a turd. Similarly, if a post is inherently worthless, it'll always remain worthless, no matter how much you edit it.

Instead, try to find hidden gems.