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So i doubt it's just only me but for the most part i don't track anime/manga news since in the end it makes no difference.

A little while back i voted to closed this question seeing all questions asking for "when is [X] coming out" or "any news on [Y]" as off-topic because they are asking for unannounced future events. but as you can see this wasn't the case with this question while this question was off-topic, or at the very least no one was fast enough to answer before it was closed.

So as a user who has the close vote privilege how can i tell the difference between a question asking for announced and unannounced future events? is it expected that before i vote i should check out the entire internet looking for the latest news before i make my vote? if i don't want to do that should i just abstain from ever voting to close as being announced future events?

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When we originally decided to allow questions about future events with regard to anime/manga production*, the onus was on the asker to demonstrate that an announcement has been made, at which point it is reasonable to ask questions specifically within the context of that announcement. In practice the vast majority of questions about future events are not of this form. However, if (for example) someone linked an announcement of the Zaregoto adaptation and wanted to ask whether only the original is getting adapted or also parts of the spin-off work Ningen, it would not make sense to close that question. Even if we can't answer it now (and I'm not sure whether we can), at some point we'll surely be able to. Most questions of this form will still be at least slightly interesting after the work has been produced.

If an announcement has been made but the asker is not aware of the announcement and coincidentally asks an answerable question, it's fair to close it anyway. Close voters aren't expected to know whether announcements have been made. Almost any "Will X get an anime adaptation" question falls in this category, even if the answer is already known. Of course, if an announcement has been made that the OP is not aware of, but it can be edited in to the question in a way that doesn't trivialize the question, that improvement would be grounds for not closing or reopening. This won't save the common "Will X get an anime adaptation?" questions, as they're trivialized by the announcement. So if someone asks "Will there be another season of SAO?" it's fine to close that question even if you know that a third season has been announced.

So, to put it briefly, allowing questions about announced future events is not supposed to allow questions where the asker happens to get lucky and an announcement has been made. It's supposed to allow questions asked within the context of an already-public announcement. That is to say, you can ask about the news, but you can't ask looking for news, as we aren't a news site. In practice such questions are rare, and the burden of proof of an announcement lies with the asker, not close voters.

*Note that in-universe questions about future events are completely allowed, as we can just wait and answer them when they are eventually answered in-universe (either explicitly or by lack of an answer at the conclusion of the work). The problem with production questions is that the vast majority of the information is not public knowledge. So we can never rule out, say, another TV season of Ranma 1/2 or Slam Dunk, even though it seems quite unlikely. In the rare cases where there is publicly available information (in the form of an announcement), it makes sense to allow questions about that information, but in the absence of any evidence to the contrary we can only assume that any information about such is private.

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    I like this proposal as an intermediate between the other ideas :)
    – Toshinou Kyouko
    Jul 5 '16 at 18:33
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I have been advocating getting rid of any 'future news' questions for a while now - and while it has recieved positive feedback, it only seems to be half implemented - even when my answer was accepted. It was also one of the top areas to clarify in our 2015 feedback session

If we go back to the first post out of all of this, @GraceNote makes a good point:

"what is to happen in the future" is something that should be kept off-topic

Jnat implemented the closure reason back in 2013:

What should be our custom off-topic close reasons?

But it was edited in the post to be changed from unannounced to all. However, That change didn't make it the whole way through to the actual close reasons - and all the other meta posts.

I realise that some questions are interesting to people, but just like ID requests, the ratio is pretty bad for good:bad questions.

Therefore I propose (for hopefully the last time) that we can change the closure reason to cover all news events that have not already taken place.

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  • so when you say "all news events that have not already taken place." even if it was reported in a manga issue that, for example, the Bleach Anime was starting again, unless the anime actually has started any questions asking about it will be off-topic?
    – Memor-X
    Jun 26 '16 at 10:41
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    @Memor-X yes, reviewers essentially have to answer the question themselves to know if it's on-topic.
    – Toshinou Kyouko
    Jun 26 '16 at 10:45
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    I maintain the position I put forth in this comment. There are many bad questions of this sort, to be sure, but not nearly enough to warrant blanket-banning them on they're-killing-the-site grounds. I prefer a charitable approach here, in which we permit these questions to stay unless there is either 1.) evidence that they are unanswerable or 2.) a lack of evidence that they are answerable (as indicated by going a reasonable amount of time without being answered).
    – senshin
    Jun 26 '16 at 11:51
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    By the way, there is one more related discussion: meta.anime.stackexchange.com/questions/2421
    – nhahtdh
    Jul 4 '16 at 2:30
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There are two things that vex me about HunterXHunter June 2016 updates?:

  • I don't think it's reasonable to expect people who are volunteering their time to moderate this site to go off and do an asker's Google searches for them just to figure out if a question is on-topic.
  • I don't follow Hunter x Hunter, but it seems to go on hiatus like every six months, and in the interim we get a question like once every two months asking "When is Hunter x Hunter coming back?" (Lest you doubt me: Any more HxH stories or episodes out there?, Is there any news about Hunter X Hunter?). We've also been getting pretty frequent "When is Attack on Titan 2 coming out?" and "When is the latest episode of Naruto / Fairy Tail coming out?" sort of questions.

This sort of question has so far been just a minor annoyance, more of a cricket in the shower than a plague of locusts. Still, I don't think they're the kind of question we should encourage. So I suggest we ask forgiveness instead of permission: close any question that appears to be about "unannounced" future events, and we can later reopen it if someone wants to put in the effort to verify that the events have been announced. That someone can even be the OP: we can reopen the question to allow a self-answer.

Since there aren't too many of these questions, I suggest we handle this with custom moderator flags: just raise a flag for "In need of moderator intervention", and write in the comment space "This question is actually answerable, please reopen".

By the way, HunterXHunter June 2016 updates? appears to be a duplicate of Is there any news about Hunter X Hunter?; it looks like the answers to both questions are referencing the same announcement from March that the manga was returning. Allowing questions like this will probably raise some ugly, sticky issues regarding duplicates, since they tend to get re-asked every so often and the answers will change over time.

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