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This is an interesting question, because it describes several real-world things:

  • Owning paper manga
  • Wanting to keep the condition of the manga as high as possible for future ownership reasons
  • It has a really nice answer, too

...but I want to be sure that this is the kind of question we want to keep around here.

Why we should

  • Asking questions around how to ensure low wear and tear on collectibles is a viable subject. Ensuring that we can preserve our manga collections with useful tidbits is always beneficial.
  • Asking questions about bonuses or hidden features of material goods related to anime and manga can be seen as an entry point to talking about it more.

Why we shouldn't

  • It's a meta discussion on anime and manga itself. We're not talking about series, but the actual physical goods.
  • This may lead down the slippery slope of asking where we could find something, at almost the same volume as identification questions.
  • I'm not sure we're really built for it; we've not built ourselves as a Q&A about figurines or service items, even though we do permit some series-related discussion on it.

Thoughts? If we want to keep these kinds of questions around, what should the tag be for them?

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    To be honest I was considering closing the question you linked to, partly because it was obviously reducible to the more general question of how books can be maintained (which isn't on-topic here). I wasn't sure though, and I might feel differently after seeing some other opinions
    – Maroon
    May 29, 2017 at 3:16
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    @Maroon It is not obvious to me that advice given generally for books would still be the best possible advice for manga. If we are talking about manga from Japan, most publishers use very cheap newsprint for magazines. Tankōbon are printed on higher quality printing paper. In both cases the paper is not just standard book paper. Additionally, the graphic nature of the format means different types of ink are used.
    – Logan M
    May 29, 2017 at 19:02
  • Re: the "slippery slope" point - we should probably have a meta discussion about that, because we do get questions about "how do I watch X" or "where do I get the BDs for Y" and we don't seem to treat them all that consistently.
    – senshin
    May 29, 2017 at 22:29
  • @senshin: Yeah, I've noticed those lately too. Would be worth drumming up a discussion about it.
    – Makoto
    May 29, 2017 at 23:01

1 Answer 1

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  • I think your first point in the "Why we shouldn't" should be in "Why we should".
  • Second point in "Why we shouldn't" is a typical shopping question, which is basically prohibited by default on most SE sites for the obvious reason of there being infinite products on any given topic and we're not a shopping recommendation site.
  • Sure we're built for it! Take a look at other SE sites where they have some questions like that, but on their topic.

We could probably expect there to be a total of ~100 non-duplicate "meta"-questions about preserving figurines, posters, mangas and dvds/blurays, which isn't that big a number if you consider how many ID requests we've sifted through over the years. And it would be actually useful information for a lot of unique visitors, unlike IDs.

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  • I confess that these are more or less weakly-held views from my part. I don't disagree with your rearrangement, but at the same time I'd like to be wholly convinced one way or the other as to whether or not these questions are viable here.
    – Makoto
    May 29, 2017 at 23:02
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    IMO until we can gather up a strong case one way or another, we shouldn't rush to prohibit anything. (in my previous comment iteration I wrote a bunch of words that basically rehash my post, so that's deleted now :p)
    – Hakase
    May 29, 2017 at 23:33
  • I was wondering about that, haha. But it sounds like your conventional thinking on this is consistent with how we've dealt with a lot around here; don't make it into a problem until it's a problem. I did want to take a more proactive role though in checking if the community felt strongly one way or another on this, though.
    – Makoto
    May 29, 2017 at 23:35
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    I come from a lot of Wikipedia work where the general idea there too is don't make it into a problem until it is a problem. I think talking about the physical medium of manga/anime discs is not out of our range here, and I also think they're useful questions/answers to have as well, even if perhaps they're not quite specific to anime/manga itself (like the one OP linked). Beyond the not quite specific thing, though, I can't really think of any downsides, and I feel it'd be a bit weird to discuss anime/manga while disregarding the fact that we digest them in the format of books and episodes.
    – JaykeBird
    May 29, 2017 at 23:56

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