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Now that custom close reasons are live, I think we should take time to discuss how to customize our off-topic close reasons.

Here's what Meta.SO did:

Viewtiful!

Which means, we'll use this to call out specific types of question we don't like.

[List pending...]

Here are some guidelines to work with:

  • Keep it simple, so new users reading these will understand, especially if they are not familiar with Stack Exhange or otaku lexicon.
  • Give solid reasoning -- try to have something that's not too open-ended as to open things up to a debate or retort, like with the legality of certain media sources.
  • Keep it brief -- there's no need to write a book about it so lets aim for under 500 characters, including links and other Markdown tags.
  • Give your reasoning behind each reason. It helps to reference previous meta posts (or perhaps we should make a unified meta post for unacceptable questions on the site?) so we don't confuse users haven't taken a chance (or time) to peruse those our lovely meta site. Kinda like what Arqade did.
  • Provide three reasons in your suggestion/answer, because that's all we get, for now...
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FWIW, I added one reason here during the rollout, as it seems to have come up a lot:

Questions on making your own anime or manga are off-topic as they involve specific expertise outside the scope of this community. See: Are Questions about “How to make Anime and Manga” off-topic?

That said, y'all don't seem to be overwhelmed here. Until it becomes a chore, I would recommend just using "other" in most cases and letting the asker know what they did wrong.

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4

I'm gonna play devil's advocate and dare to say that we don't actually need them at the moment.

How many questions do we actually close? As far as I can tell, not a lot.

On bigger sites like SO, the canned off-topic close reasons are to save time when there are literally thousands of questions that need to be closed. But on Anime.SE, we have so few question closures that we actually have the man-power to consider each one on a case-by-case basis. Quite often, we end up debating the status of a question in chat anyway.

So in short, if it doesn't fit one of the existing reasons, I'd say we should just do the custom "other" close reason and explain our case. I don't think we don't have enough traffic to get a good picture on what the "average" off-topic question is like.

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  • I'm not sure I totally agree here; yes, we have the manpower to deal with each one on a case-by-case basis, but does that mean we shouldn't take advantage of the resources we have at our disposal? – Killua Jun 26 '13 at 15:03
  • @Eric We could, but I don't want us to "try too hard" to make up reasons if we're not going to use them. The existing one that Shog added is good. But other than that, the point is that we don't get enough closures to get an idea of what the "average" reason is. – Mysticial Jun 26 '13 at 15:07
  • I agree that we shouldn't be searching for reasons, but I think we should at least hit the common ones. Shog's, as well as any in the FAQ that are explicitly labeled (but aren't related to other SE sites). – Killua Jun 26 '13 at 15:12
  • @Eric I can't think of a single common reason besides the one that Shog came up with. And he probably went through the list of closed questions to determine that. – Mysticial Jun 26 '13 at 15:13
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    Out-of-universe list questions comes to mind here. It's a reasonably new thing we've changed, so there aren't a lot of closed questions, but I think they definitely warrant their own reason as they're even in the FAQ at this point. – Killua Jun 26 '13 at 15:22
  • @Eric Wait, since when did we ban out-of-universe questions? Wouldn't that just destroy the tropes tag? – Mysticial Jun 26 '13 at 15:54
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    Out-of-universe list questions. – Killua Jun 26 '13 at 16:26
  • @Eric How many of those do we actually get? I'd go for a more generic one that applies to all inappropriate list questions. – Mysticial Jun 26 '13 at 16:27
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    @Mysticial We've had several questions asking for lists of anime. Many of them are still open, but they should all be closed. – Logan M Jun 26 '13 at 17:21
2

Questions on future events with regard to the production of an anime or manga are off-topic, as such details are only known to the creators of said works and should be checked on anime news sources. See: What do we do with questions about future events/releases?

For questions on future releases, news and whatnot.

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    Doesn't seem necessary to add at the moment, but it's good to have here so that if it does become necessary we can add it. – Logan M Aug 8 '13 at 18:08
  • This has been implemented now, but I wonder if we could change it to be specifically about unannounced future events. As far as I know, asking about future events which have been announced is still considered acceptable. – Logan M Feb 13 '14 at 4:34
  • Yes, you have a point. I'll change it accordingly. – JNat♦ Feb 13 '14 at 12:17
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EDIT: These questions should be closed as "too broad", with a comment explaining that such questions are not allowed and linking to How should we deal with out-of-universe list questions in general?. A separate close reason is not necessary in this case.

We have a bunch of old questions which ask for lists of anime or manga (out-of-universe lists). Some are still open, while others were closed for a fairly wide variety of reasons (which were usually controversial). Our new policy on this is that questions asking for a list like this should be closed. Hence, I propose the following close reason:

Questions asking for a list of anime, manga, characters from multiple series, or other out-of-universe lists are off-topic as they are impossible to answer completely and often opinion-based. See: How should we deal with out-of-universe list questions in general?

It would be nice for this to be added as a custom close reason so that we can go clean up these questions. That would also alert future readers that such questions are no longer allowed here.

Here are some questions which would fall into this category:

Deleted (2k rep needed to view):

Already closed but not deleted:

Still open:

Note: I've not included any questions of the form "Do there exist any examples of X", such as Are there any female mangaka pretending to be a male?. These are still under debate, and are at least as common as the above, but in my opinion they're acceptable until they turn into invitations for people to post more examples without adding any further content. If a question of this form is getting lots of examples posted when it's already answered (which are not better answers than the original), it should be protected and/or closed under either this reason or "too broad". I haven't checked which (if any) questions like this deserve to be closed right now.

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  • These types of questions would be a better fit in the "too broad" close category IMO. – кяαzєя♦ Jul 13 '13 at 3:39
  • @Krazer OK that sounds reasonable. – Logan M Jul 15 '13 at 18:40

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