The "On Hold" is not automatic. Users such as myself with over 3000 reputation review new questions and determine if they fall within the spirit of the site, if they are understandable, if they have been asked before, and if we think they are answerable. If a question fails any one of those tests, a user will vote to put a question on hold. If at least 4 other users agree, then the question is put on hold. You can call this system superficial and unsatisfactory, but it is the system we choose to use.

Questions about homework like the ones you linked to are not within the spirit of the site. We recognize that the number of members and visitors to the site would dramatically increase if we were to answer all homework questions, but that is not what we are here for. There are many posts in the physics meta that discuss our policy and the reasoning behind it concerning homework-like questions. So I will not go into it here.

Having said all this, thank you for your effort to improve the site. Your intent is noted and appreciated

Having also read your updated post, I want to respond in order of how you said it; so please forgive me if I repeat myself or if it seems disorderly.

In fact we can and do have it both ways. We encourage homework-like questions that ask about the physics concepts pertinent to the question. We discourage questions that ask us to solve someone's problem for them. What we like and don't like is, of you can see our decisions at course, entirely up to us (meaning a majority of our trusted users) to decide. You can see our decisions at [this](http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/5958/23473) meta post. The appearance of non-consistence may (and I stress the "may" since I cannot be sure about anyone's understanding but my own) be due to a difference between how you understand what we accept and what/why our standards for question are and how we understand it.

For the record, I do recognize that this is a sincere attempt to fix a problem that you feel we may be overlooking. It is a criticism, but a constructive criticism. As I stated before, we do appreciate the effort you put into this. The downvotes are not a dislike of your post as in the main site, they represent the opinions of our users; by downvoting, they are disagreeing with your opinion.

Homework-like questions is continually an issue we discuss. We recognize that there are some homework-like questions that are very well posed and have answers that would be valuable to a wide range of readers. What you must recognize is that we are trying to allow homework questions that teach the physics of it, we do not want this site to be one where little Jimmy can come to have a professional physicist solve question 2.18 from his grade 10 physics textbook for him. Similarly, we want our answers to be useful to more than just the asker. I won't deny that occasionally a question is closed that shouldn't be, but no community is perfect and we strive to reopen questions that we feel shouldn't be closed. However, we had to make guidelines that could cover most of the potential types of homework-like questions. These guidelines **may** occasionally make a useful question be put on-hold, but overall they do more good than harm and we are still always re-evaluating them to ensure that we allow the maximum number of HW questions while still maintaining as best we can the ideal of this site.

Moving along, you seem to misunderstand the concept of "On-Hold". A question is not put on hold indefinitely. After a few days, the [On Hold] status turns to [Closed]. After more time, closed question are often deleted. The reason we put questions [On Hold] initially is because the word "Closed" seem kind of onerous and permanent. The fact is, the [On Hold] status is meant to encourage the asker to improve the question. Any time a closed question is edited, it becomes visible to all 3k+ rep users and we vote whether or not to reopen the question. On-Hold is a temporary status that means a question should be edited to fit the site's requirements. Once we feel it is better, we often do vote to reopen a question. Alternatively, if you feel a closed question should not be closed, you can flag it for reopening. Five high-rep users must agree on reopening just as five must agree on closing. So you see, we do not leave questions on-hold forever. Just until we think they are sufficiently improved. If they aren't, the question is closed and/or deleted.

Let me close with this:
This site is not intended for just elite scholars. It is also not intended to widen the audience and raise a new generation of scholars. It is also not a forum as the word is commonly used nowadays. This is a Q&A site. We strive to answer questions about physics; mainstream physics. The idea is that someone can come to the site wondering about anything from the physics behind an everyday phenomenon or about the principles needed to work through a high-level research problem and we *volunteer* to strive to answer their questions and answer in a way that everyone else reading it might learn something new or interesting from it. There are a myriad of HW questions that fall under this description; but Jimmy asking how to solve problem 2.18 does not.

I have not looked at Tesla's question because it isn't relevant here. If you want to start a new meta post discussing how you think Tesla's question falls within the scope of the site, that's one thing; it's possible it was unfairly closed, I don't know. But you are finding so much opposition here because we have worked hard on our homework policy and we feel there is no simple way of making it better while still maintaining the ideal of the site.

We don't think you are a nuisance. However, I will admit that at least I personally feel you have perhaps been too quick to form an opinion on our overall policy when it seems you don't have a full understanding of it. But thank you regardless for the effort to improve the site.