I'm here to announce the first phase of the our clean up of "identification request", as detailed in this proposal. Seeing that there have not been any noteworthy counter proposals, we're looking to move ahead with deprecating and eventually removing these questions from the site.
The cleanup will consist of three phases: deprecation, blacklisting, and removal.
Here is a summary of the actions that will be taken in this first phase:
- Phase 1: Deprecation (Ongoing for the next 15 days, until May 23, 2016)
Modify the existing "minimum standard" off-topic reasonCreate a new close reason to say:Identification questions are off-topic (new and old), because they tend to attract low-quality and low-effort posts. The community has decided to no longer support these questions. Please refer to this meta post for additional details.
All "identification-request" question are now off-topic and will no longer be accepted on this site. However, such question are still welcome in our main chat for users with with at least 20 rep (globally on StackExchange).
- Encourage all users with the close privilege to close all NEW identification-request questions (those tagged and untagged). In other words, please do as you've been doing for the current "identification-request" questions, but now do them for all new, incoming "identification-requests." You may go around and close older identification request, but any unclosed "identification-request" questions from before this meta post will be taken cared of in Phase Two.
- Inform new users about the merchandise, cosplay, and itasha tags as needed. There will be a separate meta (to be updated) on guidelines of how to use these tags.
What's been updated?
- The "identification-request" close reason status-completed
- The on-topic help page status-completed
- The tour page status-completed
- Added deprecation notice to the tag excerpt and wiki status-completed
- The tooltip reminder for the "identification-request" tag status-completed
What's coming up:
- Phase 2: Blacklisting (15 days from this post, starting May 23, 2016, note the length was shortened after receiving feedback from users)
- Ask the CMs for assistance in closing all remaining "identification-requests" (that have not been closed), and apply a historical lock on ALL questions tagged with identification-request (and tag synonyms, as needed) The tag will stay on the post, but it will not be editable by all users, except for moderators and CMs.
- When a tag is blacklisted, any and all post that have said tag will not be accepted. While editing is allowed on locked questions by the moderators, subsequent edits to post with the blacklisted tag will remove the tag from the question.
As always please let us know if you have questions or comment on the details or procedures made in this post.