Can the flagging of off-topic questions be simplified? To help keep Mathoverflow tidy, by speeding up the removal of inappropriate questions, I often flag them and vote them down. In every case, the need for removal is obvious. Almost none of these postings is offensive, and few are spam. Most of them are school homework problems, along with a sprinkling of crank postings. Both these categories are well covered by the description _off topic_. However _off topic_ doesn't feature among the named options for flagging; so I have to select the _other_ option and type _off topic_ into the box (along with some padding to make up 10 characters). My question is: Would it be useful to add _off topic_ to the list of named reasons for flagging?

If a question is already closed but not particularly offensive, it isn't really necessary to flag for moderator attention. Such posts will be cleaned up by some routine process after a while.

If you do flag such posts with text like "off-topic", it just means that some moderator will take a few seconds to close the flag by clicking a "helpful" button. Most likely, we won't do anything more, but if the front page is really cluttered by such questions, go ahead and flag so we can delete the most noisy ones.