When making welcoming comments, should I include my own opinion on close reasons?

Question

When making a welcoming comment, one usually also points out anything that might need to be fixed in the question, the most common of which being a missing system tag. Most of the time I am confident enough to point these things out.

However, specifically pertaining to close votes, I am not sure if I should include them in the comment. Since my vote to close is only one of five needed to actually close a question, saying something like "This question seems to be opinion based" and "here's a list of forums you should check instead" may be a bit premature when it is just my own opinion.

To be more explicit about my worry in doing this: I know it is fine to add a comment explaining why you voted to close but I feel that welcoming comments in particular may look more "official" to a newcomer thus taking whatever is written in such a comment more seriously.

An example of what I am worried may happen. Suppose the following comments happen:

• PersonA: welcome to the site, take tour, etc. This question seems to be opinion based please check this and that or make this fix.
• PersonB: @PersonA nah the question is fine because < reasons >

A new user may believe PersonA more and think that PersonB is just a "random internet guy", specifically because PersonA included a pretty welcoming message.

How should I handle this?

Answer 1

It's better to start the discussion early and point new users to useful resources than to have no discussion and their question suddenly closed. You think you are only one of many - what if others feel the same and nobody tells the new user what to do and where to go? Maybe by pointing them to the help center and explaining how to make a question less opinion based they could fix the problems in such a way that it doesn't get put on hold at all.

The worst thing that might happen is that someone else comments that they disagree with your opinion and are voting to leave open. Seeing how such discussions play out can be useful for new users and there would be no harm in this.

If you vote to close it's a nice thing to point that out to the OP, either by upvoting existing comments that do that already or by providing your own.

This also makes the task for other reviewers more easy. They can simply upvote comments that already explain what POB is, what the help center says and where to find forums to show the support for this opinion. There is no need to wait and leave this part for others. If you are voting to put a question on hold you should mention what that means for the question, especially when it's a new user, and how this process works because it's very different from what most forums are doing.

Especially if you feel that "welcome comments" are more "official" you should make sure that they are explaining the official standard procedures of the site that are likely unknown by new users and can be confusing and intimidating at first.