Why was my question put on hold?

Question

This question (my post) is causing me quite some stress in trying to figure out when I should backpack, and so I really need the feedback of the TA community. I had taken Mark Mayo's advice and tried to make it less broad, but it was still put on hold. Can someone please tell me how to fix it?

Answer 1

Europe is very big, and 2 months is rather long. If you look at the What types of questions should I avoid asking? section of the help, you'll see that questions which tend to produce a wide range of opinions and not have a single answer aren't a good fit for our site.

One thing you could try doing is breaking your question up into several parts. Each part could then be a "good" question, helpful to both yourself and others in future, with a small number of related answers.

You would then need to piece together your trip from the different answers received, but you would at least then have answers to all of the components!

If what you really want is a bunch of anecdotes from people who have done similar long trips before, interspersed with off-topic ramblings, and the odd short piece of excellent advice somewhere in the middle, you'd want to ask on a discussion forum. StackExchange is not a forum, it's a place for real questions with defined answers. There will be people here who can help you, if you're able to break your query down into our style of questions!