user23346: What is the purpose of this website? I can't exactly think of a specific purpose. Are we trying to spread the anime and manga industry or something or just answering question related to it? 
As Shown on the tour page:

Anime and Manga is a question and answer site for enthusiastic anime and manga fans. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about anime and manga.

I understand how low-quality posts are disliked by users and workers but why is this a reason to get rid of some very interesting features? It states that we want a detailed answer to every question about anime and manga, but doesn't getting rid of certain features defeat that purpose?
I am, indeed, talking about identification-requests here, and I don't know if there are other cases like it, but it is a shame to see such an interesting type of questions being disallowed. Especially for new comers: most of the new comers that came to this site posted an identification request; I was one of them. We are selfish people, we only wanted to fulfill our inquiries. But it feels bad to have what technological people think as common sense slammed into my face: because I had barely any contact with technology, I didn't know what a "reverse image search" was until I came to this site. You can't expect a beginner to get everything right the first time: we need time. Not everybody has a sophisticated thought towards anime and manga, they came here because they can't find a anime/manga that they have interest in, and as a community it's not very nice nor good thing to just refuse to answer their question.
I missed the chance for putting my voice out there during the decision due to certain reasons, and since I would like to think that I am part of this community, I would still like to get my thoughts across. It's sad to see potential users of this website to leave. There's a chance that they will come back to this website and contribute to this website; it's a slim chance but it's better than 0. The more people we have in this community the better for the site, right? There are many people out there that know a lot less than we do (or you do) and have other things to do with their life: it's hard to track down a anime/manga that doesn't show up on any searches. The site says I can still ask them in the chat room and I appreciate those people who tried to help, but come on: 4 responses average with even lower quality and all of them replies as "no". And how many people look back in the chat to see if there are any questions? Not many.
I had a look at some id-requests that were kept for historical value or something and they had some really good questions and responses. The example here is where a father joined this community and asked a question for his son. How many fathers would do that? What about the guy tried his best to draw a character to find an anime? He got over 30 up votes. Is that still a bad question? What the site is doing is: because certain newcomers don't know what they're doing, the site just completely gets rid of the privilege for everyone else who liked it and followed the rules. 
I'm going to trigger a lot of people but it doesn't matter: I want to get my thoughts across.
The aim of this site is to answer every question possible related to anime and manga. If the site just gets rid of the bits that it doesn't like, what is the purpose of this site if we just shutdown questions that some people don't like? What ever happened to answering every question?

user10654: Like it says in the first paragraph on the tour page we're a question and answer site for anime & manga fans. People coming here to ask or answer already (generally) have an idea of what they're talking about, since they want either a greater understanding of a particular anime or manga or to share their own understanding.
Our primary purpose isn't to spread knowledge of the industry, and as such we don't allow questions that ask about recommendations (and now ID requests too). However, being a site where large amounts of information are shared, visitors are naturally going to gain a wider awareness of the medium.

user7866: 1. Nature of ID Request Questions
ID Request question is a question about the identity of a certain thing. In our case, that would be the identity of a certain picture taken from an anime/manga. However, this kind of a question would not be a question about anime/manga. In such question, the asker is not asking about the manga/anime since they don't even know what manga/anime it is. It would be a question about the identity of a certain image. Anime SE is a site to ask about anime and manga not identity of a certain image taken from The Web God Only Knows.
2. Site Contribution
Most of the ID Request questions posted here are done by people with less than 200 reputation points. What does it means? It means that they are not contributing much to the site. A contributing user would naturally have a high reputation points as they ask and answer questions. If you would check their profile, you'll see that many of them are unregistered users and has only one question, which is the ID Request question. I checked this on the ID Request questions that is still left in this site since it has >3 up votes, which means that I excluded those with awful questions.
ID Request questions hardly contributes something to this site.
3. Burden to Editor
There were lots more ID Request questions that has negative votes due to the lack of effort to put in good (or at the very very least, passable) question including, but not not limited to, image only question, gibberish language (no proper dot, comma, punctuations), proper formatting. I'm not saying that non English speaking users are not welcome here, no, we welcome them, but they also need to do their best to make sure their question is understandable. We have active users monitoring questions and editing them for this very reason. Surely at the very least the asker could put proper formatting, dot, comma, and punctuations to ensure that those reviewing the question could understand them and repair it. Such question was removed and is no longer available here, so I'm saying this based on my experience here.
4. Site Quality & User Base
As pointed by Hakase, point 3 caused some regulars to leave, while at the same time hardly attracts new regular user.
While you might argue that the down and the close vote on the question discouraged users from becoming a regular at this site, the closed questions are all closed with proper reasoning which is visible for all to see. Had they fixed the question to fit with the standard, we would have voted to reopen them happily. What happened in most cases was that they left it as it is. This happened over and over and degraded the quality of this site, so of course we have to take action to stop this, and that is by banning it altogether.
Their behavior (asking and then leaving without giving a darn care on whether they get a proper answer) also suggest that from the very beginning they have no interest in joining us and enrich their knowledge about anime and manga.
Conclusion
Add my answer to answers posted by other users, we are not removing bits that we don't like. We remove bits that is not related to anime and manga. We remove bits that is bad for the site. Since we love anime and manga, of course we would.

user191: Others might answer in more lengthy posts, but I'm gonna keep it short.
The main reasons to ban ID requests were:

ID requests in their nature are useful to very few people, and the core purpose of any StackExchange site is to collect questions and answers that would be useful to many people;
Overwhelming majority of them were very scarce recollections, poorly detailed and could match anything. With only "Red hair" or "There was a robot" you could list a lot of works, and they would all be wrong;
Most users have not bothered to read our very helpful guidelines that could dramatically improve chances of getting an answer, despite these guidelines being thrown at them everywhere.
ID requests have become a very big percentage of the site's posts, and the main purpose of the site was shifting away from what the existing users have joined for. This was a great risk to site's diversity.

The situation was an example of Eternal September where new users flow in and dilute the quality content, and existing frustrated users leaving because they don't like where the site is going.
And it is bad in the long term, because people would see all those badly worded and mis-formatted posts and think this is what we expect to see. 
This wasn't good for the site, and the majority voted against this.

Most of us know that ID requests can be a great way to introduce people to anime and manga, but it just doesn't work out well on this site, as this 3-year experiment has shown. There are still many other sites out there that accept ID requests. Consider joining them instead.

user63: 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.

user49: So the first section of your question is answered by the tour page (as you yourself edited in) as well as by Matt's answer. It seems like you actually have a good grasp of what this site's about, and your edit leads me to believe that that is indeed the case. Which brings us to what you actually want to talk about: identification requests!
You raise a lot of different points about this topic, and I'll try to address them all separately, but not necessarily in the order in which you raise them. Note that whenever I use "we" below, I mean "the community" and not "the moderation team" or "the Stack Exchange staff."
The site's been around since December 2012, and the oldest identification-request question is from that same month. That means identification-requests have been around since the site's been around. You can see all the discussions we've had on Meta about them here (some might be missing, if they weren't tagged with identification-questions). If you peruse through those questions there, you'll see our multiple attempts at dealing with them — we didn't just ban them out of the blue, and neither were we completely rigid about them from the start — before we decided to have a definitive discussion on whether to keep them or not.

it feels bad to have what technological people think as common sense slammed into my face: because I had barely any contact with technology, I didn't know what a "reverse image search" was until I came to this site. You can't expect a beginner to get everything right the first time: we need time.  

I get that, I really do. In fact, the community gets that too. That's why, as the Meta discussions show, we tweaked our ways of telling newcomers that their post was sub par, and how they could improve them. We went from not having any specific guidelines or close reasons, to having them and tweaking them several times. The goal of these guidelines was always to try to help users who asked these questions, either by letting them know that we needed more details, or by pointing them to some resource that would allow them to find what they were looking for that time and in future times — never to make them feel bad about not being so comfortable about technology (if that ever happened, I'd like to apologize to you in the name of the community). Unfortunately, and despite our multiple tweaks to the guidelines and processes, we always ended up with the same question: Is it worth it?
Most of these questions were being asked by new comers, as you point out yourself. You have a whole paragraph devoted to expressing your belief in a positive response to the question I asked above, and in the fact that those new comers are potential contributors to the community. However, experience shows us otherwise: most of the users who came by to have an anime or manga identified for them ended up being what I'd call "hit-and-run" users — ~97.5% (given the sample available at the time I ran the numbers, 1,212 users) of the users whose first question was an id-req created their account in the same day they asked their question, ~85% of the same sample never came back to the site after a month had gone by, and ~84% had less than 5 posts on our site. This means that, after two and a half years, only 33 out of 1,212 users had more than 5 posts on our site. So, we can ask again: Is it worth it?
And the conclusion we came to was that no, it's not worth it. Hakase's answer has a pretty good summary of why not, and so does this Meta post. In fact, you mention the problem in the question itself (my emphasis):

most of the new comers that came to this site posted an identification request; I was one of them. We are selfish people, we only wanted to fulfill our inquiries.

That's precisely what we found ourselves struggling with: the community was spending time and effort into helping people who weren't helping themselves. We spent time discussing and implementing guidelines, we spent effort in trying to look for anime or manga and requesting the users for clarification that, in many cases, did not come, when the users simply seemed to care less about their own question than we did. 
Now you do mention, in your penultimate paragraph, some cases of users who showed a lot of effort in actually getting the community the details they were asking for — and that's precisely why we decided to keep some of those questions locked and you can still see them. But let's be frank: those were the edge cases, not the norm, and it does not make sense for us to optimize our guidelines, efforts and processes for the edge cases — especially if the norm is something the community simply does not find worthwhile.
You have a lot of reading you can do, as pointed out above, on why the community ended up reaching this conclusion. But, to sum it up:

We're a Q&A site, and we'd like to help out as many people as possible by answering their questions. We have a few rules we need those people to follow, though, and we frown upon low quality content;
Most of the id-req questions fell under that category — low quality content — and ended up producing a lot of work for and demanding a lot of effort from the community;
Furthermore, id-reqs didn't quite fit our Q&A model, since they would only end up helping whoever asked them — we even used to have a close reason for that ("too localized"1);
Most of the time, whoever asked the question did not care enough to follow up on it — which, again, meant the community had to spent time and effort maintaining these questions;
The site was slowly being overtaken by id-reqs, which, given the above, produced burnout in the community, and in the most active users in particular.

To finalize: there's still chat, where many of our regulars are happy to give you a hand in trying to find your anime — note that, as with the case when we had these questions in the main site, though, they're likely to frown upon simple "hey, you know this anime with the guy with the red hair?" type of questions, since we're not here to do people's work for them.
If all that still makes you go "but why won't you help me?!?!?1!" then I need to point out the obvious: there's plenty of other sites and communities out there that are not as stringent about quality as we are, and they're likely glad to help you out :)

1 I'd recommend watching that whole talk, as it's pretty interesting and also helps people understand what Stack Overflow (and all the Stack Exchange sites, to which its model was "exported") is about. From minute 26 or so on, Joel actually starts talking about SO.

23346: <p>What is the purpose of this website? I can't exactly think of a specific purpose. Are we trying to spread the anime and manga industry or something or just answering question related to it? </p>

<p>As Shown on the tour page:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Anime and Manga is a question and answer site for enthusiastic anime and manga fans. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about anime and manga.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I understand how low-quality posts are disliked by users and workers but why is this a reason to get rid of some very interesting features? It states that we want a detailed answer to every question about anime and manga, but doesn't getting rid of certain features defeat that purpose?</p>

<p><strong>I am, indeed, talking about identification-requests here,</strong> and I don't know if there are other cases like it, but it is a shame to see such an interesting type of questions being disallowed. Especially for new comers: most of the new comers that came to this site posted an identification request; I was one of them. We are selfish people, we only wanted to fulfill our inquiries. But it feels bad to have what technological people think as common sense slammed into my face: because I had barely any contact with technology, I didn't know what a "reverse image search" was until I came to this site. You can't expect a beginner to get everything right the first time: we need time. Not everybody has a sophisticated thought towards anime and manga, they came here because they can't find a anime/manga that they have interest in, and as a community it's not very nice nor good thing to just refuse to answer their question.</p>

<p>I missed the chance for putting my voice out there during the decision due to certain reasons, and since I would like to think that I am part of this community, I would still like to get my thoughts across. It's sad to see potential users of this website to leave. There's a chance that they will come back to this website and contribute to this website; it's a slim chance but it's better than 0. The more people we have in this community the better for the site, right? There are many people out there that know a lot less than we do (or you do) and have other things to do with their life: it's hard to track down a anime/manga that doesn't show up on any searches. The site says I can still ask them in the chat room and I appreciate those people who tried to help, but come on: 4 responses average with even lower quality and all of them replies as "no". And how many people look back in the chat to see if there are any questions? Not many.</p>

<p>I had a look at some id-requests that were kept for historical value or something and they had some really good questions and responses. The example here is where a father joined this community and asked a question for his son. How many fathers would do that? What about the guy tried his best to draw a character to find an anime? He got over 30 up votes. Is that still a bad question? What the site is doing is: because certain newcomers don't know what they're doing, the site just completely gets rid of the privilege for everyone else who liked it and followed the rules. </p>

<p>I'm going to trigger a lot of people but it doesn't matter: I want to get my thoughts across.<br>
<strong>The aim of this site is to answer every question possible related to anime and manga. If the site just gets rid of the bits that it doesn't like, what is the purpose of this site if we just shutdown questions that some people don't like? What ever happened to answering every question?</strong></p>
 10654: <p>Like it says in the first paragraph on the <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/tour">tour page</a> we're a question and answer site for anime &amp; manga fans. People coming here to ask or answer already (generally) have an idea of what they're talking about, since they want either a greater understanding of a particular anime or manga or to share their own understanding.</p>

<p>Our primary purpose isn't to spread knowledge of the industry, and as such we don't allow questions that ask about recommendations (and now ID requests too). However, being a site where large amounts of information are shared, visitors are naturally going to gain a wider awareness of the medium.</p>
 7866: <h2>1. Nature of ID Request Questions</h2>

<p>ID Request question is a <strong>question about the identity</strong> of a certain thing. In our case, that would be the identity of a certain picture taken from an anime/manga. However, this kind of a question <strong>would not be</strong> a question about anime/manga. In such question, the asker is not asking about the manga/anime since they don't even know what manga/anime it is. It <strong>would be a question</strong> about the identity of a certain image. <strong>Anime SE is a site to ask about anime and manga not identity of a certain image taken from The Web God Only Knows.</strong></p>

<h2>2. Site Contribution</h2>

<p>Most of the ID Request questions posted here are done by people with less than 200 reputation points. What does it means? It means that they are not contributing much to the site. <strong>A contributing user would naturally have a high reputation points as they ask and answer questions.</strong> If you would check their profile, you'll see that many of them are unregistered users and has only one question, which is the ID Request question. I checked this on the ID Request questions that is still left in this site since it has >3 up votes, which means that I excluded those with awful questions.</p>

<p>ID Request questions hardly contributes something to this site.</p>

<h2>3. Burden to Editor</h2>

<p>There were lots more <strong>ID Request questions</strong> that has <strong>negative votes</strong> due to the <strong>lack of effort</strong> to put in good (or at the very very least, passable) question including, but not not limited to, image only question, gibberish language (no proper dot, comma, punctuations), proper formatting. I'm not saying that non English speaking users are not welcome here, no, we welcome them, but they also need to do their best to make sure their question is understandable. We have active users monitoring questions and editing them for this very reason. Surely at the very least the asker could put proper formatting, dot, comma, and punctuations to ensure that those reviewing the question could understand them and repair it. Such question was removed and is no longer available here, so I'm saying this based on my experience here.</p>

<h2>4. Site Quality &amp; User Base</h2>

<p>As pointed by Hakase, point 3 caused some regulars to leave, while at the same time hardly attracts new regular user.</p>

<p>While you might argue that the down and the close vote on the question discouraged users from becoming a regular at this site, the closed questions are all <strong>closed with proper reasoning</strong> which is visible for all to see. Had they <strong>fixed the question</strong> to fit with the standard, we would have voted to <strong>reopen them happily</strong>. What happened in <strong>most cases was that they left it as it is</strong>. This happened over and over and <strong>degraded the quality of this site</strong>, so of course we have to take action to <strong>stop</strong> this, and that is <strong>by banning</strong> it altogether.</p>

<p>Their behavior (asking and then leaving without giving a darn care on whether they get a proper answer) also suggest that from the very beginning they have no interest in joining us and enrich their knowledge about anime and manga.</p>

<h2>Conclusion</h2>

<p>Add my answer to answers posted by other users, we are not removing bits that we don't like. We remove bits that is not related to anime and manga. We remove bits that is bad for the site. Since we love anime and manga, of course we would.</p>
 191: <p>Others might answer in more lengthy posts, but I'm gonna keep it short.</p>

<p>The main reasons to ban ID requests were:</p>

<ul>
<li>ID requests in their nature are <strong>useful to very few people</strong>, and the core purpose of any <a href="http://stackexchange.com/sites">StackExchange</a> site is to collect questions and answers that would be useful to many people;</li>
<li>Overwhelming majority of them were very scarce recollections, poorly detailed and could match anything. With only "Red hair" or "There was a robot" you could list a lot of works, and they would all be wrong;</li>
<li>Most users have not bothered to read our very helpful guidelines that could dramatically improve chances of getting an answer, despite these guidelines being thrown at them everywhere.</li>
<li>ID requests have become a very big percentage of the site's posts, and the main purpose of the site was shifting away from what the existing users have joined for. This was a great risk to site's diversity.</li>
</ul>

<p>The situation was an example of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September" rel="nofollow">Eternal September</a> where new users flow in and dilute the quality content, and existing frustrated users leaving because they don't like where the site is going.</p>

<p>And it is bad in the long term, because people would see all those badly worded and mis-formatted posts and think this is what we expect to see. </p>

<p>This wasn't good for the site, and the majority voted against this.</p>

<hr>

<p>Most of us know that ID requests can be a great way to introduce people to anime and manga, but it just doesn't work out well on this site, as this 3-year experiment has shown. There are still many other sites out there that accept ID requests. Consider joining them instead.</p>
 63: <p>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. </p>

<p>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.</p>

<h2>The Stack Exchange "cultural anthropology"</h2>

<p>The concept of a Q&amp;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.  </p>

<p>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.</p>

<h2>Our expectations and you</h2>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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). </p>

<p>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.</p>

<h2>On recommendations and identification topics</h2>

<p>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&amp;A format of our site, which is why we invite users to ask for them in our <a href="http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/6697/maid-cafe-">main chatroom</a>. </p>

<p>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. </p>

<p>While many have claimed that there are benefits to identification questions. <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2467/can-we-get-some-more-definitive-numbers-on-identification-request-stats">Statistical</a> 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.</p>

<p>If you are not aware, as part of our <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3839/identification-request-cleanup-phase-3-final-delete-lock">previous cleanup</a> 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. </p>

<p>As a side note, old, non-negative questions that have answers with low views and no accepted answers get bumped by the <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community?tab=profile">Community</a> bot user, usually starting 30 days after the question was posted. So older questions with no accepted answers don't get neglected.</p>

<h2>Audience and scope</h2>

<p>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 <a href="http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/6697/maid-cafe-">main chatroom</a> 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. </p>

<p>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). </p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<h2>Afterword</h2>

<p>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 &amp; Fantasy. We are us and they are them. What works for them might not work for us.</p>

<p>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.</p>
 49: <p>So the first section of your question is answered by <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/tour">the tour page</a> (as you yourself edited in) as well as by <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3875/49">Matt's answer</a>. It seems like you actually have a good grasp of what this site's about, and your edit leads me to believe that that is <em>indeed</em> the case. Which brings us to what you <em>actually</em> want to talk about: <strong>identification requests!</strong></p>

<p>You raise a lot of different points about this topic, and I'll try to address them all separately, but not necessarily in the order in which you raise them. Note that whenever I use "we" below, I mean "the community" and not "the moderation team" or "the Stack Exchange staff."</p>

<p>The site's been around since December 2012, and the oldest identification-request question is <em>from that same month</em>. <strong>That means identification-requests have been around since the site's been around.</strong> You can see all the discussions we've had on Meta about them <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/identification-questions">here</a> (some might be missing, if they weren't tagged with <a href="/questions/tagged/identification-questions" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;identification-questions&#39;" rel="tag">identification-questions</a>). If you peruse through those questions there, you'll see our <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/q/702/49">multiple</a> <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/q/711/49">attempts</a> <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/q/783/49">at</a> <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/q/834/49">dealing</a> <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/q/891/49">with</a> <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1063/49">them</a> — we didn't just ban them out of the blue, and neither were we completely rigid about them from the start — before we decided to <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2805/49">have a <em>definitive</em> discussion on whether to keep them or not</a>.</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>it feels bad to have what technological people think as common sense slammed into my face: because I had barely any contact with technology, I didn't know what a "reverse image search" was until I came to this site. You can't expect a beginner to get everything right the first time: we need time.  </p>
</blockquote>

<p>I get that, I really do. In fact, <em>the community gets that</em> too. That's why, as the Meta discussions show, we tweaked our ways of telling newcomers that their post was sub par, and how they could improve them. We went from not having any specific guidelines or close reasons, to having them and tweaking them several times. The goal of these guidelines was <em>always</em> to try to help users who asked these questions, either by letting them know that we needed more details, or by pointing them to some resource that would allow them to find what they were looking for that time and in future times — <em>never</em> to make them feel bad about not being so comfortable about technology (if that ever happened, I'd like to apologize to you in the name of the community). Unfortunately, and despite our multiple tweaks to the guidelines and processes, we always ended up with the same question: <strong>Is it worth it?</strong></p>

<p>Most of these questions were being asked by new comers, as you point out yourself. You have a whole paragraph devoted to expressing your belief in a positive response to the question I asked above, and in the fact that those new comers are potential contributors to the community. However, <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2467/49">experience shows us otherwise</a>: most of the users who came by to have an anime or manga identified for them ended up being what I'd call "hit-and-run" users — ~97.5% (given the sample available at the time I ran the numbers, 1,212 users) of the users whose first question was an id-req created their account in the same day they asked their question, ~85% of the same sample never came back to the site after a month had gone by, and ~84% had less than 5 posts on our site. This means that, after two and a half years, only 33 out of 1,212 users had more than 5 posts on our site. So, we can ask again: <strong>Is it worth it?</strong></p>

<p>And the conclusion we came to was that <strong>no, it's not worth it.</strong> <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3876/49">Hakase's answer</a> has a pretty good summary of why not, and so does <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2805/49">this Meta post</a>. In fact, you mention the problem in the question itself (my emphasis):</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>most of the new comers that came to this site posted an identification request; I was one of them. <strong>We are selfish people, we only wanted to fulfill our inquiries.</strong></p>
</blockquote>

<p>That's <em>precisely</em> what we found ourselves struggling with: <em>the community</em> was spending time and effort into helping people who weren't helping themselves. We spent time discussing and implementing guidelines, we spent effort in trying to look for anime or manga and requesting the users for clarification that, in many cases, did not come, when the users simply seemed to care less <em>about their own question</em> than we did. </p>

<p>Now you do mention, in your penultimate paragraph, some cases of users who showed a lot of effort in actually getting the community the details they were asking for — <strong>and that's precisely why we decided to keep some of those questions locked and you can still see them.</strong> But let's be frank: those were the edge cases, not the norm, and it does not make sense for us to optimize our guidelines, efforts and processes for the edge cases — especially if the norm is something the community simply does not find worthwhile.</p>

<p>You have a <em>lot</em> of reading you can do, as pointed out above, on why the community ended up reaching this conclusion. But, to sum it up:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>We're a Q&amp;A site, and we'd like to help out as many people as possible by answering their questions.</strong> <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/help/asking">We have a few rules we need those people to follow</a>, though, and we frown upon low quality content;</li>
<li><strong>Most of the id-req questions</strong> fell under that category — low quality content — and <strong>ended up producing <em>a lot</em> of work for and demanding <em>a lot</em> of effort from the community</strong>;</li>
<li>Furthermore, <strong>id-reqs <em>didn't quite</em> fit our Q&amp;A model, since they would only end up helping whoever asked them</strong> — we even used to have a close reason for that ("<a href="https://youtu.be/0hEtQ70scho?t=29m17s" rel="nofollow noreferrer">too localized</a>"<sup>1</sup>);</li>
<li>Most of the time, whoever asked the question did not care enough to follow up on it — which, again, meant <em>the community</em> had to spent time and effort maintaining these questions;</li>
<li><strong>The site was slowly being overtaken by id-reqs,</strong> which, given the above, produced burnout in the community, and in the most active users in particular.</li>
</ul>

<p>To finalize: there's still chat, where many of our regulars are happy to give you a hand in trying to find your anime — note that, as with the case when we had these questions in the main site, though, they're likely to frown upon simple "hey, you know this anime with the guy with the red hair?" type of questions, since <em>we're not here to do people's work for them</em>.<br>
If all that still makes you go "but <em>why</em> won't you help me?!?!?1!" then I need to point out the obvious: there's plenty of other sites and communities out there that are not as stringent about quality as we are, and they're likely glad to help you out :)</p>

<hr>

<p><sup>1</sup> I'd recommend watching that whole talk, as it's pretty interesting and also helps people understand what Stack Overflow (and all the Stack Exchange sites, to which its model was "exported") is about. From minute 26 or so on, Joel actually starts talking about SO.</p>
