You don't need to force yourself to participate, if you don't feel that you are able to. Our aim for this site is not to answer every possible question related to anime and manga. This site exists as a resource to supplement your interest in anime and manga and its subculture.
We claim to neither be the "best" nor the most knowledgeable site on the topic. There are many other people and sources much more knowledgeable than the core of this community combined. Here we will try our best to help you answer your question with as little distractions as possible.
The Stack Exchange "cultural anthropology"
The concept of a Q&A site can be tricky for a new user to grasp at first. Initially they think something along the lines of "Question and answer, huh? That means that I can ask anything on the topic, right?" Partially, so. The Stack Exchange family of sites exist to collect and archive useful artefacts on specific topic. The model first started with programming question on Stack Overflow, as a lot of troubleshooting questions were collected in web forums. It was very difficult for an average user to sift through all the posts and seperate the relevant from the irrelevant. The voting, reputation, and answering system was created (and honed with time) as a platform to draw attention to these artefacts and spotlight the most useful ones, all the while giving users recognition for their contribution.
You may be think, "Okay, thats fine and all, but this is a site about Japanese cartoons and all that shit. There's nothing remotely professionally about us. We don't have professionals here (that we know of), we're just a bunch of nerds into a cultural export of Japan (or a derivative of it)." You would be right, we are a recreational Stack Exchange site and shouldn't take ourselves as seriously as our more professional sibling sites. However, even if we don't take ourselves as seriously. We need to maintain a consistent level of quality and consistency. Which is why not all question are on-topic.
Our expectations and you
We don't expect you to be literate on the technological aspect of computers nor the internet. Nor do we expect you to be up to date on the latest subculture trend and show, or even know Japanese. We don't care about where you come from, what you like, or what questions you've asked before. We're all here because we enjoy anime and manga. That's all that matters. When something is closed we generally provide an contextual explanation of why and suggestions on what else you can do.
This site exists to help you help yourself and others with questions or problems you many have on the site topic. It is not a place for you to ask people to do things for you. You don't go to a librarian asking them to do your science project. You ask them for leads to resources so you can complete it yourself. Unlike web forums where the topic is typically subjective, we try to keep a objective, neutral tone. We prefer to get to solving the problem at hand than delve into long discussions on it (thats's what chat's for).
We won't do your work for you, but we'll do what we can to help you get what you need to finish it. If you stumbled looking for something, tell us where you've stumbled and where you'd like to go. We'll get you up and running in the right direction. We won't however pull you directly to your destination.
On recommendations and identification topics
Recommendations are off-topic because many of us have different tastes. What works for you might not be my cup of tea. Recommendations tend to spiral into back and forth discussions, ill-suited for the Q&A format of our site, which is why we invite users to ask for them in our main chatroom.
Identification questions by themselves aren't that much of a problem. The users that ask them are the problem that vexes us. You see, your memories degrade after time (for most people at least). Files of memories get shuffled around from time to time, memories sometime merge with unrelated ones. It's not always a reliable source to draw from. It's easy for someone to ask about something they thing they remember, but you have to consider what a person attempting to answer your question would be doing. They need to cross reference your descriptions with things they know. It's fine if all the information needed is there, but often times this is not true. But rarely do users provide sufficient information despite our pleas.
While many have claimed that there are benefits to identification questions. Statistical and anecdotal evidence indicate the disadvantages in keeping the questions severely outweigh any advantages. The ecosystem of identification questions were unsustainable (someone needs to keep watch over them). More identification questions were being asked than answered. Many lacked crucial details or were vaguely worded. Many identification questions askers never bothered coming back after posting, essentially abandoning them if we didn't answer promptly enough. It took more time and resources to regulate questions and answers from one tag than all the other tags combined. We're tried many time to find solution, but the result was just more of the hemorrhaging of identification questions.
If you are not aware, as part of our previous cleanup efforts, we only kept a portion of the better identification questions for historical value. A very large portion of what you don't see are vaguely worded questions that were otherwise abandoned by their owners. Time and time again we've tried to appeal to these users to little avail. Doing so gets tedious after a few years. We've tried guidelines, and even simple checklists for details these identification questions should have, but few new users bother to heed them. These low quality post eventually became regarded as shitposts and the tag eventually became ignored by much of the core community. Seeing so many low quality identification questions on the front page of the site really discourages you from using the site. Sooner or later the site will be overrun by them. At that time there might be no one left to bother answering them. This was not something the community wanted. So a decision was made to clean house and blacklist the tag.
As a side note, old, non-negative questions that have answers with low views and no accepted answers get bumped by the Community bot user, usually starting 30 days after the question was posted. So older questions with no accepted answers don't get neglected.
Audience and scope
More people is not always better. Even if you have an large audience base, if you don't engage them and get them to contribute, they are as good as ghost members of a club. We won't force anyone that does not wish to participate to do so. The door is always open in our main chatroom for those that wish to participate but are unsure of where to start. We're a small community with users from various parts of the world. We might not all be as willing or available to answer your questions, but don't get discouraged if we can't help you initially feel free try again at another time. Someone else might be there to better assist you or at least point you in the right direction.
Not all questions are a good fit for our site. We try to answer them as best we can when possible without rumors or speculations. Sometime we succeed while other times we fail (miserably).
We try to draw a line at a point where we can provide you with the best and most accurate information, but know that many of us aren't professionals on the topic (i.e. content creators, copyright/licensing lawyers). We're not privy to a lot of things. One being an English language site we miss out on press releases and interview from within the industry. Two being we're not professionals so we can only give you our perspective as fan, especially on the gray areas of legality, or creating anime and manga content.
We're just enthusiastic fans (like you) looking to help other fans. Sometimes we get a little trigger happy with post and comment. We all human (most of us at least) we are not always perfect and make mistakes. It's alright to call us out on it if we do make them, so we can correct ourselves.
Afterword
We don't expect you to conform to the Stack Exchange way of thinking if you don't want to. Nor do we expect you to read through the mountains of text in our help center or videos about Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow's founding principles (who has the time for that?). Not all the philosophies apply to us. We're not Stack Overflow, we're not Arqade, we're not Movies and TV, we're not Science Fiction & Fantasy. We are us and they are them. What works for them might not work for us.
As a user all we'd like for you to do is enjoy using the site and have fun where you can. Unlike other Stack Exchanges, we tend to me more lenient on the rules. If you make a mistake, we usually try to inform you on what you did wrong and how to rectify it than admonish you. If you have any further questions or concerns, you may use meta or chat to reach out to the community for help. Don't worry (most of us) won't bite. We'll be here for you when you feel that you are ready.
