6

Many new users post "I want more anime like XXX" and it's closed forever as off-topic. But instead of diluting correctly tagged question count with these, let's just retag them to and add a warning that these kinds of questions are off-topic, along with a "welcome to chat" message, so that 20+ rep users can avoid posting a useless question, waiting for someone to come by and invite them to chat by manually posting the same comment over and over.

Solves 2 problems:

  • Users get their recs and faster;
  • Less tags used on forever closed questions.

What do you say, community?

  • I don't feel that creating a tag that will never be used, except as a warning, would be the most efficient way of handling this situation. I mean if they're not going to read the tour or the check what's on-topic, what's to say they're even going to read the tag excerpt. – кяαzєя♦ Jul 23 '14 at 19:52
8

This seems like a bad idea to me. Making a tag to be used for entirely off-topic questions will just enable people to ask those questions easier.

Recommendation requests are typically closed very quickly anyway. If they have a net negative vote record and no answers, they'll be deleted automatically anyway after 30 days. That's short enough that it doesn't really dilute the count of bad questions in any given tag significantly. Users with enough reputation for the moderator tools privilege (currently 2k) can accelerate this by casting their own delete votes on the question 48 hours after it's posted, which will also deal with the rare case that it has answers. If the post reaches -3, trusted users (currently 4k) can bypass the 48 hour restriction and vote to delete immediately (and moderators can always delete), but this kind of deletion isn't particularly urgent in my view.

If the question sits at a net score of 0, it will be deleted after a year, and if it has a positive score the automatic deletion script will never delete it. In a case like this, when the question is clearly and completely off-topic and the OP didn't read the rules, downvotes are merited, so these questions should always get deleted.

Deleting these questions should be our ultimate goal. Making a new tag to move them to only to have them be deleted soon after seems like a lot of work (it will need to be recreated frequently or we'll need to use a hackish workaround like what we did with ) and I'm not sure I see a lot of benefit.

  • Alrighty then, just downvote and leave for automatic deletion it is. – Hakase Jul 23 '14 at 20:01

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