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Are question about building a computer character (AI) on topic?
The question
Computer Scrabble UI & communication protocol?
is a gray area on this site.
If this type of questions are about how to use algorithms to programm AI, then it should be cover on the faq that we allow it. In this question, OP is asking about a protocol to communicate his AI with a board. So is not related to the game itself, is more related to a particular algorithm.
Maybe we can add info to the faq that we allow questions that ask about how to build a particular AI (e.g.: should my AI check first this movement or that one? what could be the best move in this case?) and not allow a particular implementation of the AI (how would you add an algorithm in C# to know which building buy on XX?).
Could be that this type of questions are in fact strategic questions?
Or should we also allow implementation Questions about AI design?
EDIT:
I'm don't know about this questions. I think we should explicit allow or disallow this type of question, just to attract this type of guys or not. IMHO if we can gather people that has tech knowledge (using VASSAL or other) could be a nice thing, but I fear that will confuse first time users. Unless we explicit explain that we cover games and also they computer representation, only if a real board game exists.

I think you're making a dangerous conflagration of "new users" vs "casual users".  A new user to the site might be an expert AI programmer, game designer, or what not.

This question should absolutely be on-topic.  Here's why.  The best we can hope to do with a Stack Exchange site is to build a community.  The thing the site is 'about' is what brings us together.  So, if the question involves one of the most popular board games of all time, it is obviously on topic.  It might not be a good question, or violate any of the other SE guidelines, but the one thing is cannot be is off-topic.
There will always be plenty of places to find overlaps between stack exchange sites, just like in the real world there are overlaps between the interests of different communities.  A question should not be thought of as belonging to only one community or another.  It should be thought of as being about different things and the different things it is about matter in terms of which communities would be interested.  This question is about both Programming and Scrabble, thus should definitely have a home on both sites.

You need to also consider where you are most likely to get a GOOD answer to a question.  You can call a question on topic, but that means nothing if there isn't the required knowledge base to answer the question.

@CaulynDarr In this case, I think you're actually going to get a better answer here than on (for instance) Stack Overflow. Because expert-level Scrabble players are more likely to know the answer than expert-level programmers.

@AlexP which is why I called the question out as on topic in my answer.  Though, I think for the most part the category of Game AI is off topic.

@CaulynDarr True! Sorry to have implied otherwise.

I will accept this answer, since everybody is puzzled about this or nobody cares.

Just because a question involves a topic that is welcome here does not mean it is welcome as well - that would render almost all questions eligible for any site. I agree that some questions may be on topic on multiple sites, but we need to be somewhat strict in the clearer cases.

I think the linked question is on-topic if just barely.  He's not asking how to program a scrabble engine, just if there is an accepted protocol to link scrabble engines with scrabble UI's.  While it's a technical question, I don't think there's another SE that can better answer it.  A dedicated scrabble player just might know the answer(and one did).
As for questions about programming AIs in general, I don't think those should be on topic.  It's a very complicated technical field better served by a SE that handles mathematics or computer science concepts.
I think someone can ask questions about optimal strategy choices that would help inform the creation of a game playing AI, but any of the particular implementation details would not be a good fit here.

What about VASSAL implementation question? those will fit here??? there is a thin line between this question and one about how to do X on VASSAL...

I think VASSAL questions would be too specific and not useful for the majority of users here.  It would be like asking how to cut gaming pieces out of wood with a jig-saw.  Yeah, it's kind of related to gaming, but you'd find the woodworking SE to be a better resource.   The VASSAL forums and wiki would be a better resource for working with VASSAL.

There has been a lot of discussion about this topic. The question in question relates to a welcome game, but it's also about programming - gray area.
My take is that computer questions are on topic if they

Involve the same mechanics as the board game and
Do not relate only to the computer implementation

Condition 2 is clearly violated here, so I would tend to vote against this question.
Gamedev on the other hand seems like a perfect home. In fact, condition 2 seems to be the distinguishing factor between the two sites.
However, by making the question more precise and useful for the whole audience, it can become a very good question on BCG.
For instance, with some basic work already done, you could ask about a specific strategic aspect of the game that is important to the AI you're designing.

I'd love to read about and answer questions about board game AIs.

Would that in fact be strategic question or more related to "build" them?

I think this question would fall somewhere between Arqade https://gaming.stackexchange.com/, because it involves an electronic game, and GameDev https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/, because the answer could involve modding the game.
However, since Arqade is more strict about closing slightly off-topics questions, I'd move it GameDev.

Does the accepted answer move with it? It'd be a shame if it doesn't...

It doesn't involve an arcade game. The game is a table game, the implementation in this case is on a PC, but you can almost play any game with anything. The point here if this type of question are valid here or not.


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Is this really on topic: Cost of board games vs. other entertainment?
How does the cost of designer board games compare to other forms of entertainment?
This question doesn't seem to really belong here, but I'm an infrequent visitor so I thought I'd bring it to meta.
It doesn't ask about the play or development of a game, no how-to information, no information used to help me pick a board game vs. another board game.
Does it really belong?

In my opinion, no.
I left it up for the community to weigh in on.  I don't believe there have been any close votes yet.
I did find the top voted answer pretty useful though.

I agree - to me, this is a question that is interesting to consider, but not a good fit for this format.

As the asker, I have a biased viewpoint, but Yes.

The question is about board games.
The question is of a limited scope.
The question asks a practical, answerable question about a real world problem I have faced.

Who hasn't gotten reactions of astonishment when telling a nongamer the price, "$50 for a boardgame?! You know, they have videogames that cost that much." Many nongamers are used to Monopoly prices for boardgames ( > $20)
A nice metric like $ cost per hour of enjoyment is a practical way of swaying peoples belief that boardgames are not that expensive.

your question posted was essentially "how does the fun/$ for games compare to other past times?"   Wouldn't that make "How does the calories/hour for board games compare to soccer?" on topic?   Also fun/enjoyment is pretty subjective.  Wouldn't "Will my date like playing board games or going to the movies more?" be on topic too?

@AlexB,I disagree that that is the question. The question essentially boils down to, how many games are you likely to get out of the price of a single board game. This gets at the heart of, are board games expensive. How
many calories/hour does playing BG do you burn would be on topic. Will my date like playing BG would be removed for being too localized. Oh wait, you were being ironic, not serious.

If your question was supposed to be how many games are you likely to get our of the price of a single board game then I think you should edit your question to match. As written if the price of going to the movies goes up or down, the correct answer could change. As you proposed in the comments here, your question would age well and be on topic.

Unfortunately, either version (the current one or the one Alex B proposed) is likely a question where every answer is equally valid, which is why I voted to close it. While the question addresses an important subject with respect to board games, I don't feel it's a question that a Stack Exchange site is designed to answer: asking how much value one could get out of a game is subjective (in terms of how much one might play it), localized (with respect to cost, both in terms of time and locale), or both.

@DaveDuPlantis, and yet only one answer has any significant upvotes, even though your claim is they are all equally valid. I guess that is the difference between theory and reality. Hard data can be obtained by people. They could estimate their average amount of plays per board game, and arrive at a $/hour figure (statistics, damn lies, and lies). Unless you can show that inflation has affected the price of boardgames dramatically differently than other forms of entertainment, you don't need to adjust for it. As for adjusting for locale, aren't you really adjusting for shipping?

Even if they did estimate average amount of plays, each person could come up with a different answer, and all of them would be equally correct ... and that seems to be the case. One person estimates $1 per player-hour, one uses burritos, one mentions intangibles, and one mentions a fixed number of plays. I don't believe you can look at any of those answers and say "That is not a valid answer."

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Tags concerning specific aspects of a game
I just asked a question on Dominion card/board game, and I introduced a tag dominion-attack-reaction to describe this particular aspect of the game mechanics. Is this kosher? I see tags mostly being used to describe the specific games that the question is being asked about; I used dominion tag in accordance with this tradition. I tagged a couple more questions that might be relevant, although I don't really have the tag priviliges.

Adding additional tags is only worth it if:

People will be searching for that particular type of question
You can become an "expert" in that particular tag, above and beyond being an expert in the general tag (i.e., there's no point in a general [strategy] tag, because you can't become an expert in every possible game; there's also no point in an [uno-last-card] tag, because anyone who's an expert at Uno is always also an expert at how the last card is handled)
There are enough questions to justify the existence of the tag.
People are going to use the tag going forward. Tags are supposed to arise naturally through use, rather than being imposed by a cabal of users on Meta.

As for formatting, doing it as (gameName)-(gameAspect) is definitely the right shape for an aspect of a particular game.
I don't think the dominion-attack-reaction tag should be added. There are a bit under 200 Dominion questions at the moment, which is respectable, but not so large that it can't just be searched with "[dominion] reaction". While you can specialize a bit in learning about reaction cards in Dominion, it's not so large of an area of expertise as to require its own subtag. Also, I can see that there are only about 7 questions that might use dominion-attack-reaction at the moment; the subtag just isn't large enough to justify its own existence.

Fair enough, I've just been trying it out.

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Bidding tags for bridge questions
Quite a few questions recently (this is an example) ask about the merits of a specific bridge bid, but don't specify what system is being played.
The problem is that bidding is nowhere near universal enough to meet SO standards.  Different clubs have different default systems (Standard American is not universal even in the USA, and practically unheard of elsewhere); different books have different definitions of the system; different pairs have different understandings of the book.  There was originally a 'natural' meaning for each bid; but even if if still exists (doubtful), it doesn't cover any bid about which a question is likely to be asked. For example, a take-out double is clearly a conventional bid; when to make it depends on what your system prescribes. As one commenter on the example said, 'You think it's a textbook bid to make: I think it's a textbook bid to avoid. We may be using different textbooks'.
Would it be helpful to replace the 'bidding' tag with a set of sub-tags, (perhaps 'bidding standard-american', 'bidding acol', 'bidding precision' and 'bidding non-conventional')?
Or should we discourage this sort of question entirely?  They may be too localised to be of value to future enquirers; the point-count for a specific bid will be affected by what point-count is required/permitted for other bids, which may mean the question requires a book-length answer; and they do by their nature require discussion and advice, rather than the clear objective answer SO sites usually look for.
(I don't mean to sound pompous, still less to criticize TomAu; but I think the point should be discussed.)

Related: http://meta.boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/476/questions-about-specific-bridge-hands. I tried to argue that they are not suitable for this site and tried to comment on such questions which appear, but seems like the community still encourages such questions so I have given up commenting and have resorted to trying to answer. I do like the idea of the tags, so +1.

Of course, the tag [bidding-standard-american] might still mean different things to different people. But I suppose it makes sense to have it mean "a variant of standard american".

This sounds like something that could be addressed on the Bridge tag description itself.
If there isn't near a common agreement about what the tags would mean I think it would only tend to confuse new members.


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Game of Go Area 51 Proposal at 100% Commitment
The Game of Go proposal on area 51 has reached 100% commitment.
The discussions we had about the MTG site, which were somewhat diverted as academic, are now relevant.
I updated this thread to reflect this current information.


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Can we do something about getting a simple on-death-trigger canon question?
Yesterday, this got asked: When a permanent has a "When a creature dies" ability, and gets destroyed at the same time as creatures, does that ability trigger?
We've had questions before on what happens when such a creature/permanent dies simultaneously with others.  It got closed as a duplicate of:

This Marchesa question: What happens when a creature with "Whenever a creature dies" dies simultaneously with multiple other creatures?, and
This Teysa question: Does the 2nd ability of Teysa, Orzhov Scion trigger with mass destruction?

The latter two are currently open, and the first of the two has a title phrased as a canon question on the topic. My issue is: it is the worst of the three at being a canon question.
Ideally, a canon question on a topic is be really clear and simple. It should be focused on that one topic as much as possible, with minimum excess, so as to not reduce clarity at all. That way, people will search for it, find it, and understand it, and not ask a new question — nor find themselves S.O.L. when we close their new question as a duplicate.
The Marchesa question is the most complex and unsuitable of these three! The question is the longest, and there are more mechanical bits involved in this particular situation (resurrection, counters, a condition on the trigger) than the other two questions (you get cards/spirits).
Both of the other two are short and simple by comparison. I attempted to make the one asked yesterday the new canon question (I wasn't aware of the Teysa question), and retitle Marchesa's question to its original non-canon-ish state, but that retitle got contested and rolled back by another member (comments about that here).

So. Bottom line: I think we should retitle one of the other two as our canon question on the situation, or create a new one, and not stick with Marchesa as a canon question nor keep it with a title that gives it the impression of being one. What should we do?

How about a compromise?
Close the old question as a duplicate of the new one.
I agree that the new question makes a better canon question. The wording is much simpler. The examples are easier to follow. The answers are cleaner.
Leave the title of the old question alone.
There is nothing wrong with the generalized title of the Marchesa question. The ruling on Marchesa also applies to Blood Artist, Deathgreeter, and hundreds of other cards. The question had so little to do with what Marchesa's specific ability actually does and everything to do with whether or not it triggers in the first place.

If you are going to close my question, because it talks about a really specific case for a more general question and you want to create an canonical Q&A for the general question, I think the closed question (i.e. mine) should have a specific title, that matches its specific nature that is the reason it was closed.

@Kryan You are essentially saying that your question should wear the scarlet letter - a brand that says "I was closed for being too specific." - and I don't agree with that. Your question should be the best that it can be, closed or otherwise.

I don’t agree that the general title makes the question better unless it is to be used as a canonical question, which it isn’t. The best title is the one that accurately and succinctly identifies the question, and the question (however much it ended up being irrelevant) was about Marchesa specifically.

In principle, I think this is a good idea (I feel like I say that a lot). The newest question. The newest question is the simplest expression of the question we have so far, and the others add some complexity that distracts from the actual answer. However, I see a few minor problems that I think we should consider, but that are not necessarily sufficient to not do it.
Implementation
This is probably the easiest issue to solve. If we want to implement this, we need 5 votes to open each of the two closed questions, and 5 more votes to close the 2 older questions as duplicates. I think doing it half-way will end up worse than leaving it in the current state. We don't want to have two of the questions open, or all of them closed (Further experimentation indicates that this is impossible), or a chain of duplicates. Each of those provides a worse user experience than what we currently have. Basically, we should try to make sure we put the votes together before we start.
Asker experience
When someone asks a question and it gets closed, it often feels like a punishment or reprimand. And in some sense, that's accurate. Closing as "off-topic" or "too opinion based" means that they should have read the FAQ. Closing as a duplicate means that they should have searched before asking. Usually users take the message more harshly than we mean it, but the meaning is generally still there. That is why I am hesitant to close a question that followed all the rules and was not a duplicate when it was asked. Surprises, and especially negative ones, are a bad user experience. I'm not saying that this is a deal breaker, just that it's something to consider. (EDIT: Apparently the person who asked the question is explicitly OK with this decision)
Policy implications
If we do this, it raises the question of whether we should generally close old, detailed questions if someone asks a new, more canonical question about essentially the same thing. As I said in my second paragraph, this takes a concerted effort, and would probably often require at least reopening the new question and closing the old one, so it would make sense to have a plan so that users generally know when it should be done. Sometimes it would just be unwieldy; if the old question has 10 duplicates pointing to it, changing all of them may be too much of a pain to bother with.
What if a new question is asked that is an even better canonical question. Do we change all of the dupe targets again? How much better should it be to make that change? (EDIT: It seems that this question has already been brought up on this meta)

Speaking from experience on RPG.SE, where we close a lot of questions: dupe closures rarely cause upset, and it's almost always when the other question doesn't provide a clear answer, i.e. upset is totally reasonable. (The other close reasons do sometimes cause upset.) We don't need to avoid closing a question just because someone's feelings might get hurt: they can go ahead and get hurt, we're closing the questions for ourselves too to keep things in order. We're optimizing for pearls, not sand.

For implementation: if the MTG community shows general agreement here on meta, we could request mod assistance with getting things in order.

For my part, I'm not going to be upset at having the Marchesa question closed; my question was answered, my playgroup now understands how it works and take it into consideration appropriately when I play my Marchesa deck, and I haven’t even used the deck in a month or so.

I agree with the OP. The Marchesa question is a complex question, one that is perhaps best treated as a "standalone," as opposed to a model or duplicate for other, simpler questions.
It may be because of the "complexity" of the Marchesa question that the "creature dies" question was considered to be "subsumed" under it, and therefore closed as a duplicate.
I don't think that's what we should strive for. The "creature dies" question makes a much better "building block" question, and should be left open for future reference.
In a "forced choice" I'd say, close the Marchesa question as a duplicate of "creature dies." But I'd hate to do that, because "Marchesa" actually came first, and I don't want to "rewrite history." Besides, the two questions went into different "subissues" that people may want to address separately.


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What can/should we do about a question that's turning into a spam repository?
I refer to this question: How to make custom Cards Against Humanity Cards?
It's a really good question to ask! It has some totally valid answers too: alterations, use the actual blank cards coming out with recent packs, use a print service.
That last one is a problem though: four of these answers (1 2 3 4) are just promoting an online printing service. Three of these (all but #1) are from users otherwise totally inactive on our network, which is really concerning: this question's becoming a spam repository.
What should we do?
I feel like protecting the question won't be quite enough, because it will still be open up to arbitrary "here, use this printing service" responses as in #1.

I have protected the question. That will stop new users from adding answers, which should deal with most of the problem you're seeing.
Besides that, if you think an answer is spam, flag it as spam. That's what the spam flag is for.

A high rep member protected the question, meaning that people with less than 10 rep on the site can no longer answer it.
Unfortunately, some of the "spam" answers were upvoted, meaning that those people with 21 rep can now answer other "protected" questions.
There was no reason for people with more than 25 rep to upvote the bad answers.
Instead, people should flag for moderator attention as soon as the first spam answer is posted.
The system "works," we just need to be more alert, and "quicker on the draw."

This is exactly one of the things protection is meant for. Protecting the question means that if someone wants to post a link to promote their printing service, they have to post a good question or good answer elsewhere first. But blatant spammers tend to have a "quantity over quality" mentality; they want to plaster their links as many places as possible without investing time and effort, since that's how they make a profit. It's not worth their time to come up with another good question or answer, post it, and wait to accumulate 10 rep.
If someone who does have 10 rep on this site posts an answer that seems to be purely promotional, well, perhaps they are just recommending a service that they've found to be useful. Perhaps not. But they do have at least a slight posting history that you can use to help you make that judgement.
Another thing you can do is (get a moderator to) add the "insufficient explanation" post notice, which says that answerers are expected to include some detail in their answers, not just post a link. It also needs to be enforced through aggressive flagging and deletion of link-only answers. If that happens, it further raises the bar for spammers. I think your spam problem would pretty much disappear at that point.
Honestly, though, I wonder whether questions like this, which can be effectively answered with just a link, are really a good idea on SE. The vote totals on answers are rather meaningless for such questions. But that's a separate issue.


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The [game-theory] tag is consistently misused. How do we resolve this?
The game-theory tag is a bit messed up at the moment.
Game theory is a well-established field of study of strategic decision making by living beings. It is deeply involved in how people resolve conflicts or get what they want out of each other. A famous example is the prisoner's dilemma. Basically, it's an area of psychology that seeks to understand certain human behaviours. The tag's wiki alludes to this topic as being what the tag is about.
The seven six questions in this tag appear to have absolutely nothing to do with this though - it's not being used for questions about game theory, it's being used for questions about theories about games.

Five ask: this game solved, or what's the optimum/winning strategy?

Is Circus Maximus solvable? (no other tags)
What is the optimal strategy in Quantum Tic Tac Toe? tic-tac-toe
Maximum attainable points for a single player in a two player game of Carcassonne carcassonne
Is Ultimate Tic Tac Toe solved? tic-tac-toe
Hex board game strategy board-game-adaptations board-size

One asks for the mathematical discoveries about Go. This may be actual game theory.

What are the main results in game theory regarding Go? go

One just asks for a name for a thing that, I am pretty sure, isn't even part of game theory. It's been retagged.

What's the name of the theory that the player with the most options has the advantage? (no other tags)

Due to its chronic misuse, these questions should probably be retagged with something else that actually describes what these questions are about. How should we retag them, though?

"An important notion in Combinatorial Game Theory is that of solved game (which has several flavors)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_game_theory. I still upvoted your question, because I think this is a good exercise in keeping the site clean, even if I disagree with retagging the solved games.

Ah! So asking about solved games is part of a branch or relative of game theory, though apparently possibly not part of regular game theory itself.

I think all of those questions are relevant to the tag, with the exception of "maximum attainable points", which seems to be more of an optimization problem.

@Hao Ye - "Maximum attainable points", where that is the winning criteria, is related in the sense that it implies perfect play by you.

@ire_and_curses: In some situations, it could be related, but as phrased, the question in the thread basically assumes collusion between two players to optimize one person's score, so no strategy is actually involved. It's just an optimization problem constrained by the tileset and scoring rules of the game.

@JonathanHobbs I'm not an expert on game theory, but I believe I know enough to say that it's called game theory precisely because it was developed to determine optimal strategies for games (i.e. to solve them). So I agree with other commenters that the tag is appropriate for these six questions. Modern game theory differs from its roots only in the scope of what is considered a "game."

I was under the impression it existed to understand human behaviour, and what people could be getting out of certain common zero-sum exchanges that made no sense. Understanding the optimal strategy is only a small part of understanding why the heck people do what they do, like why two prisoners would turn each other in when they could both stay silent and get off free. It's just psychology, not optimisation.

There's even some dispute on the Go question about its tag, I just noticed.

@JonathanHobbs (2 comments up) I missed your response earlier, but: I don't think that's the case. Understanding human behavior is only one application of game theory, in which it treats interactions among people as games, and even then it only works to the extent that people can be considered rational actors.  The psychological analyses you're thinking of actually pick up where game theory leaves off, and allow us to understand why people might not act in accordance with the optimal strategies that game theory predicts.

@DavidZ: The biggest distinction between game theory and CGT is that the former considers (mainly) games of luck and imperfect information while the latter considers (mainly) perfect play of mathematical games with perfect information and no random elements. Both theories are interested in optimal strategies.

@Rainbolt: you quote Wikipedia on CGT rather than on Game Theory, suggesting strongly that solved games are more appropriate to [tag:combinatorial-games] (which covers CGT) than to [tag:game-theory].

Game theory, in its general and original sense, is a branch of pure and applied mathematics that studies the optimal or feasible strategies available to interacting players in various types of formalized decision-making scenarios (which often are, though they do not necessarily need to be, games).
Although a relatively young field of study (less than a century old), game theory has grown to encompass a broad range of subtopics, and has become an important tool (and a subject of study in its own right) within a number of sciences besides mathematics, including but not limited to economics, political science, psychology, biology and computer science.  Within this broad field, a number of fairly distict subtopics may be recognized, such as:

Combinatorial game theory, which studies sequential games of perfect information, such as Chess, Go or Tic-Tac-Toe.  These games are characterized by the property that they include no randomness or hidden information, and thus by the fact that, if all the players follow a perfectly optimal strategy (which must exist, in theory, even if it is not known), the outcome will always be the same.
"Classical" game theory, which assumes that all players are fully aware of each others' possible strategies and payoffs, but not necessarily of the specific moves others have chosen to make, and that they all choose their strategy independently to maximize their expected payoff.
Cooperative game theory, which allows players to collude and form (more or less) binding coalitions through some kind of enforcement mechanisms.
Evolutionary game theory, which replaces the assumption that players rationally choose their strategies with the assumption that they each follow a fixed hereditary strategy which they pass on, possibly with small mutations, to their offspring.

The point to note here is that all these subfields, and many more besides, fall under the broad umbrella term "game theory".  In fact, pretty much any mathematical (or quasi-mathematical) analysis of games could be considered a part of game theory, except maybe for games of pure luck (which are traditionally considered to fall under probability theory, although some might see this distinction as more of a historical artifact than an actual qualitative difference).
As for the questions mentioned above, as a mathematician I would regard them all as falling under the scope of game theory, even if some of the answers here may not possess quite the level of mathematical rigor I would usually expect of a formal game-theoretical analysis.
Specifically, the following questions ask about optimal (or quasi-optimal) strategies of sequential games of perfect information, and are thus clearly within the scope of combinatorial game theory:

Is Circus Maximus solvable?
What is the optimal strategy in Quantum Tic Tac Toe?
Is Ultimate Tic Tac Toe solved?
Hex board game strategy
What are the main results in game theory regarding Go?

The remaining two questions may not be about combinatorial game theory, but do seem to fall under the scope of classical game theory:

Maximum attainable points for a single player in a two player game of Carcassonne might or might not be a combinatorial question (I'm not sure if the stated assumptions are enough to eliminate all the randomness and uncertainty from the game), but if not, is surely is within the scope of classical game theory.
What's the name of the theory that the player with the most options has the advantage?, while somewhat confusingly written, essentially presents a claim about optimal strategies (namely, that expanding the strategy space for a player cannot reduce the value of the game for said player) and asks whether this claim is a known game-theoretical theorem.

The real problems with the game-theory tag here, IMO, are two-fold:

several of the questions are simply not very good questions, or, even if the questions might be potentially interesting, are poorly asked; and
even the game-theory questions that are reasonably well asked seem to rarely get good answers on this site, presumably because we don't have many mathematicians (or people from related fields) here to answer them.

Honestly, I suspect that several of these questions would've been better asked at math.SE, or possibly at MathOverflow.  That said, I can also imagine valid game-theory questions that might get better answers here (e.g. because they required extensive knowledge of a particular board or card game that most mathematicians would be unlikely to have), so I'm not quite ready to say that the tag simply shouldn't exist here.  But it is, IMO, sort of borderline.
Anyway, to summarize, I don't think there's anything wrong with the use of the game-theory tag on these questions.  There might be other things wrong with them, but those issues should be resolved by editing or closing the questions, not by retagging.

Ps. We do also have several questions that are clearly about game theory in the mathematical sense, even if they're not (currently) tagged with game-theory.  A few examples I found are Does a winning strategy exist for Don't Break the Ice? and
Are there guaranteed winning strategies for Quarto?.

As of 2018-12-17 we have [tag:combinatorial-games], whose tag-info makes it clear that it is mean for CGT. I have applied it to the questions for which it is said above to be appropriate, and removed the [tag:game-theory].

@PJTraill I have voted to reject all of your suggested edits.  The consensus from this meta post is that no change is necessary to the tags.  If you still think that the tagging should be changed, you can reopen the discussion here or with a new Meta post, but please do not initiate a retagging without community consensus.

@BJMyers: Sorry: I see that I misread this answer: I saw the line clearly within the scope of combinatorial game theory and missed the conclusion don't think there's anything wrong with the use of the game-theory tag. I agree that my retagging conflicted with that conclusion, but I do feel (a) that the conclusion was based on a situation where we did not yet have [tag:combinatorial-games] and (b) the distinction between CGT and classical Game Theory is real and useful, even if CGT is part of Game Theory in the broadest sense. But it is now way past my bed-time so I must stop for now.

@PJTraill There was a Meta post in 2017 requesting a "combinatorial-game-theory" tag - it seemed generally rejected, having a -2 score before it was automatically deleted.  The [tag:combinatorial-games] tag was created by the same user that proposed the cgt tag, and he/she applied that tag to the only two questions that had it.  So the whole creation of that tag was really without community consensus either.

I recognize the difference between the two tags, but I think that for this site it is really splitting hairs to try to distinguish between them.  The kinds of questions (and probably question answerers) to whom this distinction matters are probably better suited for [math.se].

I have a simpler solution.  Change the definition of the tag.
While you are correct that Game Theory has a very specific meaning as relates to Math we do not need to be bound by that here.
At this site we should use game-theory so that it has a consistent meaning to us, the users of B&CG.  We don't have much need for a tag dedicated to the math meaning of the term.  Folks looking for answers in that vein should be directed to math.stackexchange.com
I think the usage of the tag is pretty OK as it stands now.  Splitting one low usage tag into three tags doesn't seem overly useful.

Game theory is psychology. It's combinatorics which covers maths, or combinatorial game theory.

Also I'm only suggesting splitting it in two - the last one was already retagged away, and then re-retagged as just a general terminology question, which we already have plenty of. Optimisation is simple enough, and probably has broader use here - I'm just not sure about the one that seems to genuinely be about combinatorial game theory.

As of 2018-12-17 this is quite unnecessary, as we have had [tag:combinatorial-games] for some time, and this is intended for CGT; I have applied it to several of the questions where it was more appropriate than [tag:game-theory].

Let's create/use three tags for these categories respectively:

optimization. Three of the first category are about the optimal strategy, and whether a game is solved probably counts too.
combinatorics or ai. I'm not sure about these two tags, actually, but the resources linked on this answer (like this one and this one, and the book On Numbers and Games) are explicitly about combinatorial game theory, which is game theory as much as physics is mathematics - heavily involves it, but a pure mathematician isn't going to be the best person to ask about particle interactions and decay, for instance. If tags are about "connecting experts with questions", we wouldn't be doing a very good job tagging a question for combinatorial game theory experts with just "game theory".
terminology. (Already applied in an edit)

[tag:optimization] and [tag:terminology] sound OK, but neither [tag:combinatorics] (quite) nor [tag:ai] is ideal for CGT, for which for some time we have had [tag:combinatorial-games]. [tag:ai] would be appropriate to AI techniques such as neural networks (as used by AlphaGo), which are not CGT. [tag:combinatorics] would apply to a broader field of mathematical techniques such as counting and classifying various sorts of patterns; these might also apply to some non-CGT questions, though I suppose on a Games-site most combinatorics will be CGT.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Why were my comment flags declined for some obsolete or discussiony comments?
I flagged a few comments on this answer as obsolete, and one not constructive. All were declined. I flagged them because:

one suggested another removal card in addition to the one I mentioned, now mentioned in the answer. (flagged as obsolete)
two discussed whether exile was the only viable strategy; it's pretty reasonable that one got confused since both recommended removal cards involved exiling. Someone else responded to settle that confusion. I updated my answer to settle the confusion as well. (flagged as obsolete)
one was secondary discussion. It wisely pointed out that one of the involved cards was helpful against another card entirely, though that's entirely tangential to the question at hand, and the involved card is helpful against a great many cards. (flagged as not constructive, on account of being discussion, however constructive it was in terms of general MtG strategy discussion)

I totally appreciate these comments. I flagged them because they no longer needed to be around, though. I mainly use an SE site where comments are rigorously enforced as being a means for suggesting improvements or requesting clarification, and once we make those improvements or clarifications, the related comments get flagged and cleaned away. Comments engaging in discussion also get cleaned away. So I'm experiencing a culture difference on this site, or I'm missing something.
Why were my flags declined? Is there something more I should be doing? A custom mod reason with an explanation, or something?

I wasn't involved in handling those flags, but my two cents: none of those comments seem to be causing any problems, so there's no reason to take any action on them. Specifically, the first comment is no longer relevant, but there's no harm in showing who suggested the idea. Regarding the exile discussion, again there's no harm in leaving the comments that led to the current state of the question. And the last is only one comment, and it is relevant to the question. Basically, in my opinion, unless the comments are harmful or really chatty, there's no reason to do anything to them at all.

Sure, but they don't serve a purpose any longer, either.

I agree with that; I just don't think it's worth moderator time to verify that when the comments are completely harmless. There are cases where obsolete comments are misleading misleading, and where not constructive comments are belligerent or insulting, and those are the comments that I think are worth dealing with.

Hi Jonathan, I'm not sure but I would think @murgatroid99's explanation in the comments is why your flags were declined, even though I don't think they were unhelpful (you handled this case perfectly in my opinion). (I did not talk with the other mods on this topic yet.)

Sorry for the late reply - somehow I missed this.
I was the one that declined the flags. The reasons were several, and mostly correctly guessed by others:

I don't like deleting comments during the active phase of a Q/A. I personally find it weird and disturbing to come back and find my comments gone. And I take pride in my good comments, and like to occasionally check them out and see if they got voted up. An alternative, also valid point of view is that cleaning up comments keeps the site clean and focussed on the essentials. From a moderation perspective, I take the same position as Pat - I remove old comments that are no longer necessary, but I give them a grace period. Since I personally don't see a lot of value in comment removal, I don't put a lot of effort into it, but if I see them, and they're uncontroversial, I remove them.
When the content of the comments has been fully incorporated into an answer, or an issue has been unambiguously resolved to the satisfaction of all parties, then I tend to delete them immediately.
Removing comments sometimes upsets the commenter. It then takes more time to explain why the comment was removed, and deal with the upset. So if the situation is relatively neutral, I err on the side of retaining comments.
Comment flags are prolific, and they aren't all that important in the greater scheme of things. I'm sympathetic to the discussion here. The main points are 1) there are a lot of comment flags, 2) they take a surprising amount of work to resolve correctly, 3) they aren't a huge value add.
Sometimes it's not easy to tell whether a comment is truly obsolete. Although I am a Magic player, I don't play with modern cards. It's significant effort to prove the flag, and in my opinion, value judgements like this quickly enter a murky world where moderation can overstep its authority. See for example my discussion of the not an answer flag.
Accepting/declining is a way of giving feedback to you, the flag raiser. By declining, I am suggesting this flag was not worth raising. In my opinion, although there is nothing technically wrong with these flags, they are not worth the time for you to raise, and for me to understand, arbitrate and manage.

Thanks for your response!

Good question!
Here is one possible answer:
Deleting a comment string such as the one you pointed to should probably be done at some point.  I'm not sure the right time to do it is minutes after you edited your answer to incorporate the comments.
Deleting comments could confuse users, particularly new ones, who were either participating in the conversation, or even just observing it.
I tend not to delete useful comments unless they've been around for a month or so. At that point, I figure everyone who was active on the question has moved on and cleaning up the comments will improve the experience of future visitors.

Thanks for the input - I'll bear in mind to leave it a while before I flag this stuff. (Now if only there were a time-delay feature or somethin'...)

"I tend not to delete useful comments... " If they were useful, they weren't obsolete. I think your point is valid, but your "Here's what I tend to do" paragraph could probably just be removed because it detracts from the point you were making.

@Rusher - "if they were useful, they weren't obsolete" is not accurate.  One does not preclude the other.

Your flag may have been declined for one of two reasons.
The moderator involved disagrees that the comment was obsolete.
This is the only legitimate reason to deny an "obsolete" flag. The comment may be obsolete to you, but the moderator may have reason to believe that the comment may still be useful to a future visitor. "Useful" is very subjective, so don't be surprised when the explanation you get make little sense.
The flag reason carries more weight with some moderators than others.
Some moderators attach extra baggage to flag reasons. Here are two examples:

I declined your obsolete flag because the comment wasn't harming anything.
I declined your obsolete flag because the comment was less than one month old.

In my opinion, the only explanation for not deleting a comment flagged obsolete is "It wasn't obsolete." No arbitrary restrictions. No month old time limits.

This is an example taken from another similarly low-traffic site that I am active on. I understand that every site is different, but I don't feel like those differences are relevant here. If you think they are, leave a comment and explain why.
On Programming Puzzles and Code Golf SE, we address comments by editing the post or by pointing the user to a specific part of the post (because they didn't read it very thoroughly). Shortly afterwards (within a few days sometimes), the comments are purged by a moderator. If another user asks the same question, then we improve the post to make that part more clear or more visible. This kind of continuous improvement is what Stack Exchange is all about. Stale comments and discussions taking place in the comments is not what Stack Exchange is all about.
I would encourage the moderators on B&CG SE check with moderators on other similar traffic sites to see if their arbitrary practices are consistent with Stack Exchange practice.

I'm not sure an answer like this is entirely appropriate for this question, given it seems to mainly exist to criticise the moderators for their stance on handling obsolete flags. If you have an issue with that, I suggest you open a separate meta question to address the matter.

@JonathanHobbs I edited the answer so that some (but not all) of the aggressive wording was removed. I also divided the answer into two parts, of which the latter is clearly more subjective than the former (although they are both subjective because the topic is subjective). I welcome more comments, or even edits, from you explaining which parts are still too aggressive or extraneous, but please don't just dismiss the entire answer. If you disagree with a particular piece, then explain why. If I can't address it neatly, then we can open a discussion or just agree to disagree on a point.

If you want to change policy, though - which it appears you want to do from the very last paragraph - you're better off trying to do that via opening a [[tag:discussion]] question to address the issue. An answer to a support question is less likely to have effective results.

@JonathanHobbs I never called for a "change of policy". I asked the moderators to follow existing practices. It's one thing to disagree with my answer, but it's another thing to dismiss it entirely, especially after I politely asked you not to. It is very clearly an answer to your question. Why were your flags declined? Because the moderation here is inconsistent.  I could discuss the validity of this claim in a separate meta topic, but that would imply that I have doubts about it. I don't. I've seen the way two moderators handle flags here, and it's wrong to me.


text:
Canonical question request: "Can I pay extra costs when casting a spell without paying its mana cost?"
We have a couple of questions that are just variations on the theme of paying additional costs on a spell being cast for free:

Hideaway Lands and Additional Costs
Can an imprinted spell be kicked when it is cast?

I'm not aware of a canonical question on the matter, but we should probably have one, either via editing or just wholly creating one. Could someone look into how we might do that?
I'm about to go to sleep and shouldn't be attempting this endeavour myself, but might attempt it if no action's been taken in the intervening time.


text:
Switch Magic autocard over to a different search engine, Scryfall
So... we've had a history of bugs with the autocard feature linking to Gatherer. Whatever way we try to link to it, there's always new and different arbitrary cards that break for some reason. Today in chat we discovered an entirely new bug scenario with ordinary card names not working right, which sucks.
Up to this point we've been working on the assumption that Gatherer must be externally accessible as a search engine as long as we just use it right and find the right way to feed it card names. But at this point, I don't think they do try to make it externally accessible.
The bug was: we found out that when a card name is two or more words, and there's another card name that also contains those words, the search fails completely and returns no results. This impacts Waxing Moon (which exists) because there's another card called Cult of the Waxing Moon. This also impacts famous cards like Phage the Untouchable (who also exists) because there are vanguard avatar "cards" for them in Gatherer, like this one for Phage. (But curiously not Etched Champion, which also has an avatar.) When a card is just one word, like Recall or Chronatog, it returns a search page for all cards including that name, without an error.
This stuff really isn't our fault at this point. To date we haven't found a single reliable formula that, for all cards, takes the card name and gives us an exact link to just that card and not a search, and we've gone looking several times. There is no documentation on how to do this correctly nor does Gatherer integrate with years-old modern browser search features, both of which I think they'd provide if they intended to make this system externally accessible.
Then there's also Gatherer's language issue
We discovered recently that Gatherer search fails for anyone from non-English regions. If German is your computer's primary language, Gatherer configures itself to operate in German for you. If you click on an autocard link on Boardgames.SE (because you're also comfortable using an English site), our autocard links tell Gatherer to search for that card name — but it searches for it in the list of German card names. Of course it doesn't find the English card name in the German card list, so the search fails and tells you the card doesn't exist.
This has lead people to edit posts to use straight-up links to the English versions instead of using the [mtg:autocard] syntax. People often won't even know why Gatherer isn't working for them, because they never configured Gatherer themselves. There's no way we know to tell Gatherer to search in the English card list.

Depicted: the results of clicking an autocard link for Grizzly Bears whilst the site is configured to Japanese.

Let's switch to a different MTG search: Scryfall
(Full disclosure: I'm a Scryfall patron on Patreon and I talk in their Discord channel with other patrons and the team. I have no other affiliation with them and don't stand to benefit in any material way from recommending them. They didn't ask, pressure, or incentivise me to do this in any way, shape, or form. I have checked with them about BG.SE doing this, and linked this page to them.)
Scryfall started up just over a year ago and has become a very popular card search engine in that time. It's wonderful to use and, most importantly for us, has external accessibility as a major development goal. (To the extent they also have a well-developed public API.) Its database is kept up to date with correct details and comprehensive card imagery, and they routinely stay up to date with card previews within a day or two.
... So basically it has everything we'd want. It also has a reliable formula for us to use for searches. And it fixes that language issue by being English-only right now; they have an internationalisation project in their distant future.
Stack Exchange devs: Requesting we use a third-party resource seems weird, so I feel this merits some explanation. M:TG players use a lot of third-party services to augment our involvement in the game. Gatherer plays a role as the single source of truth for Magic card details (including errata, etc) but it is not the go-to search engine. Up to last year the go-to search engine was Magiccards.info, but then Scryfall came out as an effort to modernize MTG searching & deliver things Magiccards.info wasn't doing, and so far they're succeeding.
The search formula
https://scryfall.com/search?q=!"CARDNAME"&utm_source=stackexchange

Scryfall's developers confirmed this one as OK. They requested we include the &utm_source=stackexchange particle for better tracking. In this formula we replace CARDNAME with the card's name: https://scryfall.com/search?q=!"Grizzly Bears"&utm_source=stackexchange
Links below this point all use this formula, although do not contain the &utm_source=stackexchange particle.
One text transformation: strip out double quotes from card names
The only actual transformation we need to apply (beyond normal URI character encoding) to the card name is to strip out quotation marks in the card name (") because they'd mess up that formula. This still works; I'll mention why shortly.  Apostrophes (') are fine and don't need to be removed. There's only four cards in all of Magic that use quotation marks in their name, so that means:

If I write [mtg:"Ach! Hans, Run!"], strip out the quotes to make it just Ach! Hans, Run!: https://scryfall.com/search?q=!"Ach! Hans, Run!"
Same for [mtg:Kongming, "Sleeping Dragon"]: turn that into Kongming, Sleeping Dragon: https://scryfall.com/search?q=!"Kongming, Sleeping Dragon"
[mtg:Pang Tong, "Young Phoenix"] becomes Pang Tong, Young Phoenix: https://scryfall.com/search?q=!"Pang Tong, Young Phoenix"
[mtg:"Rumors of My Death . . ."] becomes Rumors of My Death . . .: https://scryfall.com/search?q=!"Rumors of My Death . . ."

This works because Scryfall actually ignores punctuation completely. Even https://scryfall.com/search?q=!"rumorsofmydeath" works just fine. It does this because the developers don't want people to have to remember if Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree has one or both of those hyphens in it or not, or if Saskia the Unyielding has a comma or not (like Nissa, Vital Force does). It's a very forgiving mechanism, but still exact on the actual words you use.
Some test cases using this formula

The Longest Card Name Ever Elemental
Split cards can be searched by either or both halves: Alive, Well, Alive/Well (the traditional double slashes are also fine: Alive//Well)
Aftermath cards too: Insult, Injury, and single/double/triple slashes are all fine: Insult/Injury, Insult//Injury, Insult///Injury (since they ignore punctuation anyway)
Cards mentioned above all return their exact correct matches without errors or a search page: Phage the Untouchable, Waxing Moon, Cult of the Waxing Moon, Etched Champion, Chronatog, Recall
The card simply named X
Searching for Storm Crow returns both the actual card and the token variant generated by Crow Storm.
Searching for a token by name returns each unique functional variant of that token: Soldier

The functional same-name reprints from Unstable result in a search page of all variants, which to my mind is a good thing:

Very Cryptic Command
Garbage Elemental
Knight of the Kitchen Sink
Ineffable Blessing
Sly Spy
Everythingamajig

When I say this is a good thing, it's strictly better than what Gatherer does, which is to just return one variant (Very Cryptic Command, Everythingamajig) without hinting that the other functional variants exist.
The nonfunctional variants just return one result since they're handled the same as reprints: Extremely Slow Zombie
Every other card yet mentioned in MTG Autocard bug reports not already mentioned above
(All of these work.)

Circle of Protection: Art
Ranger's Guile
R&D's Secret Lair
Question Elemental?
B.F.M. (Big Furry Monster)
Sphinx's Revelation
Sun Titan
Sundering Titan
Black Lotus
Erase (Not the Urza's Legacy One)
Ghazban Ogress
El-Hajjâj
Ring of Ma'rûf
_____
Framed!
Sauté
Who/What/When/Where/Why, accessed by the full name.
Yet Another Æther Vortex
The Ultimate Nightmare of Wizards of the Coast® Customer Service
Chicken à la King
Junún Efreet
Pharika's Mender
Lightning Bolt
Platinum Angel
Grafdigger's Cage
Trial / Error (and Trial and Error)

Some of the above cards have diacritics, the "Æ" grapheme, or punctuation that's unusual for an English writer. Note that I can also write those card names without remembering those details or knowing how to enter those unusual characters with my keyboard:

El Hajjaj
Ring of Maruf
Saute
Chicken a la King
Junun Efreet
Yet Another Aether Vortex

Details for MTG players
Scryfall has the following plan:

Index all printed and online cards accurately, including extras, joke cards, tokens, etc, all with high-res scans

Index official spoilers

I checked their general policy on leaks:

Scryfall doesn't post leaked/stolen cards until they're officially spoiled. However, sometimes WotC does "guerilla marketing" where someone opens a pack on a table or in "my attic" etc and we have to guess if it's really an official spoiler or not and we may guess wrong. We also don't count stuff like early release promos or release marketing materials as "leaks" because those get shipped to stores and are almost always posted immediately.

When you say they stay up to date with card previews, do you mean they have officially previewed cards before they're in Gatherer? Do they pick up errata similarly quickly?

Also, thanks for figuring this out! Whatever the answer to my question, it seems like it's probably an improvement, and the main issue is just whether SE has time to deal with it. Hopefully at least this API will be much more stable and it'll be a one-time investment without a need for future patches.

@Jefromi During preview season, they added cards as they were previewed around social media. E.g. here's the Spoiler Date view for Unstable and the Spoiler Date view for Ixalan. They haven't had their own preview card, but they've archived those that showed up. IIRC they also archive leaked cards, such as the sheet of foil promos that was leaked shortly before Ixalan started preview season.

@Jefromi It's my hope as well that it's a one-time switch, without needing to hassle Stack Exchange devs to find ways to fix our interface with gatherer any longer. :)

There has been several posts with evidence that the issues we have with gatherer are because the links are not being created correctly and if that was fixed we would not have the issues.

Errata quickly too? I'm not exactly wild about them including leaked cards (and us linking to them) - more visibility/incentive for leaks, and easier for users here to accidentally see leaks they didn't want to. But I suppose it's probably worth it for the reliability in normal cases.

@Jefromi We discussed leaked cards on meta here, the current stance being that despite moral issues we pragmatically need to also be free to acknowledge that they happened and examine them because of their influence on the competitive landscape — we don't avoid or ignore leaked cards. If we maintain that policy then a search engine that indexes leaked cards seems reasonable to me. To my knowledge they have integrated errata rapidly (in the order of days, a week at most).

@doppelgreener Part of that was simply restating a personal view. However, the conclusion did include treating leaks as true spoilers (with markup, avoiding crucial details in titles, etc) in order to help people who don't want to see them. Adding the ability to easily link to full information for leaked cards tips that balance slightly. Yes, the links can probably also be spoiler-guarded, but it does make it slightly more likely that people will end up seeing unwanted spoilers. Again, I said it's probably worth it anyway, but I do think it's less than ideal.

@Jefromi I haven't seen that actually happening previously -- nobody's referenced spoiler-season or leaked cards in any question I've seen yet, where that question wasn't specifically about spoiler-season or leaked cards. People could do that even without autocard by just directly linking to Scryfall or Mythicspoiler. (Maybe people could run searches in Scryfall and come across spoiler cards? But lesson learned, during spoiler season searching finds spoilers.) OTOH I want our autocard feature working, and Scryfall is the only site that stays rapidly relatively up to date at the moment.

Yup, agreed, one is a bigger issue than the other. I do think I saw a question or two about leaked cards at some point - maybe some of the BFZ/OGW ones? - so I didn't think this was entirely hypothetical.

@Jefromi Asking questions about leaked cards is definitely not hypothetical and has happened, but people talking about leaked cards in answers to questions not about them is not something I've seen. (Unless that's exactly what you're referring to?)

@doppelgreener I wasn't making a distinction between answers and questions. I'm just saying that it makes it a very small tick easier for people to accidentally see leaks.

@Jefromi I was doubting my memory so I double checked with them about how they handle leaks: they don't. Added a bit to the end of this question.

I'm opposed to switching engines. Gatherer is the official source for card text. Only Gatherer is guaranteed to always have the current wording (and the occasionally helpful rulings) for everything. I know that I would always double-check card text, which means more work for no gain.

@Hackworth FWIW I think the current plan is to change our gatherer URL to one that works for our test cases.

Yes, please lets do this!
The inconsistency of the current autocard can actually end up taking more time than it saves. When it works it is fine, but when it doesn't you need to head out and find the cards then link them manually anyways. Currently I have taken to double checking my autocard links after I post, if they are broken I have to fix them with an edit (which bumps them on the FP unnecessarily).
I am sure that swapping from Gatherer to Scryfall will be beneficial for them, but personally I don't mind as I think there is a lot to gain for us as well. I think we will have the benefit of being a large driver of site traffic to them, which will probably incentivize them to add features/fix bugs for us quickly in the future.

I agree Scryfall may materially benefit from this arrangement, and that so do we from having a reliable search. Currently they're working to cover their hosting costs via Patreon and the traffic increase may both increase costs and help them cover those costs.

I've had to do this as well, quite honestly the preview should parse autocard like it parses other things, that way you can check they work before you submit a post - it's less of an issue now than it used to be though.

FWIW, as of version 1.50 (just released today, January 23, 2018), my SOUP user script now implements this feature (extending and replacing the Gatherer-based reimplementation of [mtg:...] card links included in earlier versions of SOUP).
The fix applies on all MtG card links using the [mtg:...] card link syntax (also in edit preview!), replacing the Gatherer URLs generated by SE with links to Scryfall as suggested above (yes, with &utm_source=stackexchange included).  It does not currently try to modify any manually created links to Gatherer or to any other site.
Currently, the links open in a separate browser window, like the current SE card links do.  (You can always force them to open in a new tab instead by middle-clicking them.)  Given that this version of SOUP also adds support for hover popups for MtG card links, it could be argued that normal links might be more useful for people who actually want to click through and see more than just the card image.  Feel free to express you support or opposition to this (or any possible third options) in comments below.

We still should definitely do this
Most of the issues with using gatherer have been solved, new updates to how the autocard works with gatherer have fixed a lot of them, but there is an issue that no one has mentioned here yet - Gatherer has issues with uptime. I have never seen Scryfall down, but I see gatherer down once or twice a month at least (including when I was doing my L1 judge test, made it a lot more difficult because they too use gatherer's hosted card images, I just searched the cards up on scryfall).
I am English speaking and gatherer for me is in English, so I don't know if that part of the original post is still an issue, but I've found Scryfall to be simply more robust in every way, and I know it does not have that language issue.

No, we should stay with Gatherer.
I see the advantages of Scryfall and shortcomings of Gatherer search. However, there is one crucial point in favour of Gatherer that outweigh any inofficial search engine: It is the official source of all MtG card wordings.

108.1. Use the Oracle card reference when determining a card’s wording. A card’s Oracle text can be found using the Gatherer card database at Gatherer.Wizards.com.

This implies that Gatherer wordings are, by definition, always correct and always in sync with Oracle changes. If there was ever any dispute over a rules question that depended on the wording of a card, a Gatherer reference would always win out over a non-Gatherer one, and double-checking cards from a non-Gatherer source with Gatherer would only add extra steps.
It also has official Gatherer rulings. They usually are just re-statements of the relevant rules, but can occasionally help with tricky questions such as this..

It should also be noted that a lot of bugs have been fixed with the gatherer solution recently.

Well, Scryfall updates their rulings when the new rules update happens. I've pinged an email to them about how/when they make this update.

No, I think we need to look at the current system to make sure we are using it properly and sending in search terms to the site in the expected format to return correct results.
Have we reached out to anyone working with the gathering site about the language/card name issue? This could be an issue that they just are not aware about and could work on getting a fix in place.
When testing links using the search string that they suggest on their help page it does return results for these cards even though you still have to pick which card to view which is not ideal.
http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/search/default.aspx?name=+[%22Waxing%20Moon%22]

I do remember there was a thread with a potential fix for the language issue but I am not fully sure on that
Why are the card links broken?

We've already done that several times though. Here, here, here, here and here all represent different efforts to get our card search working with Gatherer. Each iteration works for some cards but breaks for other cards. The devs implemented one of these or a slight variation; I don't recall; and it has breakages.

Like I noted in the top of the post: we've been working under the assumption that surely there must be a reliable way to get all name queries always working with Gatherer, if only we use it correctly. I don't think that assumption is actually correct. There is no evidence Gatherer is built to be an externally accessible search engine, and there's evidence (like lack of documentation on how to do this) that this is not the case. (In fact we're the only site that I've ever come across that directly reaches out to Gatherer for card lookup.) I'm not in favour of "try to figure it out more".

Efforts to fix this problem have already occurred. The autocard links got updated about a year ago based on our suggestions. I believe changing to a new search engine will resolve our autocard lookup issues.

Please do, then, since we haven't yet found a solution to make all card lookups work in Gatherer without error. (And there's still the language issue, which is causing an issue for Russian, Italian, etc individuals here in Europe.) I'm proposing "let's dump Gatherer and switch to another search" as a solution to our autocard on the basis we haven't been able to get a reliable Gatherer search working yet. If we can get a reliable Gatherer search query, we don't need to switch. If you have an input formula, we can check it against the test battery we've built up.

That said, I might also be a fan of switching on the basis of Scryfall solving the language issue, which results in people skipping or editing away autocard links altogether as well as opening a couple of recent Autocard bug reports here on meta, whether they understand what's going on behind autocard failing them or not. But that would be less of a "fix the stuff that just isn't working" thing.

@doppelgreener I apologize apparently my memory was bad and the best I can do from looking at the gatherer documentation is to return multiple results for cards that share words. Though I still think it might be a good idea to reach out to the people running gatherer to see if they have a solution for this issue.

Thanks for checking. I think we used to have that, but it also meant things like Sun Titan gave us a search page (because of Sundering Titan) and IIRC cards with apostrophes broke (Pharika's Mender, Ranger's Guile) prompting people to write [mtg:Pharika Mender] instead.

I see that URL doesn't break for Pharika's Mender, which is good. It gives us search pages for e.g. Chronatog or Alive or Alive // Well which isn't ideal though, and it breaks on R&D's Secret Lair.


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Are questions about interactions with groups of triggers interacting with the same card acceptable?
A new card has been (or will be) printed in m14, Strionic Resonator, which copies triggered abilities. This has massive potential for confusing people by copying quite complicated triggered abilities that will feel like a bit of a minefield without any real one size fits all answer (at least, in my opinion)
for example, with miracle triggers (which I have already asked about in this question) I believe the answer to be essentially "nothing happens", but this differs from the answer for transform triggers from the same block (innistrad), wherein I believe the creature should transform and then transform back.
I am sure there are plenty of other confusing situations where different things might happen. Are seperate questions for these iterations on the same theme acceptable?

I would say to go ahead and ask any questions you have.
Whatever the answer to your meta question turns out to me, it isn't generally binding on the folks who would be voting to close on the main site.
Ask away, see what happens and I suspect everything will turn out OK.

ask away is what i have done! thanks


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How should a question (with answers) that has changed significantly be handled?
I have been watching the question How do people build a Magic deck once they have a general starting point? with some curiosity over the last few days.
If my memory is correct, originally the question was asking about how to decide when to stop collecting cards, and after being closed, reopened, and going through several edits is now a question about how to build a deck (a somewhat related, but pretty different question).
Two answers were posted to the original question, which now do not answer the new question, and the question itself has 17 comments (as of writing this), mostly discussing the closing, editing, and reopening of the question.
I believe the question is now fine, but all the old answers and comments are no longer relevant.
Is it ok for a user to change a question like this?
Is there a mechanism in place to prevent this from occurring?
Should some level of moderation occur to clean up the page?

Ideally, people would refrain from answers until a question is well formed. Multiple close votes, and comments indicating problems with the question should serve as a warning. After the fact, if the question cannot be reformulated to match the answers currently given, the question and/or the answers should be deleted. I personally don't think much will be lost by deleting all the answers.

The question isn't even very good the way it is currently worded, "How do they go about the actual construction and tuning, and determine when a deck is actually playworthy?" This question is extremely subjective, even if we assume that the players objective is to win.

Here's the original version of the question.

Here's a discussion of the same thing on RPG SE, which does a lot of subjective questions about games.


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Can I get Reopen votes from other Bidge players?
This bidding question, while not great, still inquires on a topic that can be addressed sensibly. Note that my answer steps the reader through a logical process of analyzing possible responses according to the priority which bridge experts have developed over the past century, as I understand it. I believe it is worthwhile hearing the opinions of other strong players, so as to allow the Stack Overflow paradigm to work - let the best answer float to the top.

Whilst I agree the topic can be addressed sensibly, I feel it's a bit premature to ask for it to be reopened - it might in fact never be reopen-worthy, given the querent's account is apparently deleted. Despite the topic's broachability, there are a number of clarifying questions sitting in the comments that highlight places the question needs improvement in, and the asker's unlikely to update it. It may be cleared up one day, but we close based on the current state of a question, which is: unclear. Could you suggest why we'd reopen this? Have you considered creating a canon question?

@doppelgreener: No wonder actual bridge players keep abandoning this site. Have you ever played the game? If I delete my comment does the question become worthy of re-opening? Three of the question closers have zero questions, answers, and votes on bridge or bidding tags - WTF are they doing making decisions on a question for a game they are ignorant about?

@PieterGeerkens I wonder if that actually should lead to a meta question about the responsibility of reviewers. I skip review tasks having to do with bridge because I know nothing about the game (along with 40k and games that have complex rules systems). It would surprise me to find out that multiple users were making close votes on complex games they had no knowledge of, and I would consider it to be detrimental to the healthy operation of the site if answerable (although bad) questions were being closed as unclear because of it.

@Pieter Whatever axe you have to grind, grind it with someone else. Those are your clarification requests, and there's several questions there. I'm simply asking for a compelling case to reopen it, when there appears to be a compelling case from yourself why it should be closed as unclear (it needs clarification).

I would say with your comment on the question asking for more information that keeping it closed until those questions start getting answered would be good.

The question you are referring to is missing a lot of information about the entire situation that is needed to answer the question. You even mentioned that in a comment on the question. While your answer may be generic enough in order to provide some answers as a site we need to ensure that there is enough information on questions to provide solid answers.
Also with the user having deleted their account there will be no way to get the information needed to provide a clear question that can get a clear answer.

And you are knowledgeable about Bridge how? I see no revealed expertise on either Bridge or Bidding in your profile. have you been holding out on us?

Based on the comment you posted on the question and the lack of any details in the question. You don't have to be an expert to spot a really bad question.

So you are going to punish all Bridge contributors on this site because I thought the question could be improved, and that OP could be educated about how to post a great question instead of merely a poor one. My comments are addressed to OP, being comments on the original question, and are an educational process aimed at OP on the importance of those facts in evaluating  one's bid.

In fact the argument can be made, and has been made by other non-bridge contributors on this site, that if all those questions had been answered the question is a poor fit for the site by virtue of being of no interest to other readers. Your overwhelming ignorance of the game Bridge  is why you should Skip questions on tags you know nothing about.

Putting a question on hold is what should happen for bad questions, when they are fixed they can be reopened. The simple fact is that is a bad question that needs improvement.  If other people in the bridge tag agree with it being open they would have voted so. And remember tag knowledge is not required for reviewing otherwise they would never be completed on a small site like this.


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Can I get more reopen votes for this question?
This question on bridge bidding in NT auctions, which although brief is quite adequately described, has been closed as too broad. The problem described is a quite common one for bridge beginners and early intermediates, and arises in all bidding systems. Although the answers will outline various conventional techniques as the existing (very short) one does, there is much that can be said on how to handle this common problem in the absence of specific techniques.
I would like to make a stab at such an answer, but am prevented from doing so
by the closure on the question. Please help out by voting to reopen.
Thanks very much.


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Can I ask for some restraint from casual Bridge players in closing questions?
In the past few months a number of questions on Contract Bridge have been closed in, to my mind, an overly aggressive manner:

Bridge-response after intervening bid
How many spades does my partner have when responding to my opening 1club bid and left overcalls 1 heart
Grand slam bidding with high card points hand
Which transfer do you use with both majors - one 5 carder and another 4 carder

While not perfect, I believe all of these questions can be answered within the site guidelines. A few of us have worked diligently over the past two years to try and expand the usefulness of B&CG as a resource for beginning and intermediate bridge players, and having these questions closed so aggressively seriously undermines our efforts.
Can I ask those of you who review the Close queue but are not accomplished bridge players to exercise a bit more caution? Rapidly closing these questions likely drives away new users who would help us to expand this site out of Beta.
Update:
As per discussion below, it has been noted that the sparsity of strong bridge players on the site requires that those with only a casual acquaintance with the game are needed to help maintain the tag.
Perhaps if casual and non-Bridge players could refrain from casting a First vote to Close or Reopen, and attempt to look beyond just the first comment or two before making a decision. Also, please consider choosing the Skip button when you don't feel that a strong case has been made.
Do others feel that this proposal is workable within the guidelines for the site?

@Tom Au: Can you help out with this perhaps?

All of those questions seem to have explanations or clarification questions in the comments that indicate why the question should be closed. In fact, in the second and third examples, you made comments indicating that the question should be further clarified or narrowed.

@murgatroid99: 1) Of all the close votes cast for those 4 questions, only one was cast by an actual user with significant contributions to the Bridge tag on this site. 2) re #3, OP clarified in a comment - I have edited to place in question. 3) re #2 - I also commented at the time that the question was answerable despite the flaws.

Moderation on this site is not on a per-tag basis. On each of the first three questions, the first comment indicates that the question needs further clarification, and that is going to be the primary source of information for reviewers. 2. In question number 3, the question was closed as "too broad", then it was clarified, and now it is in the reopen queue. This is exactly how question closure is supposed to work. The point is to stop it from being answered until it really can be answered. The same goes for question number 2: it was clarified, and now it's in the reopen queue.

@murgatroid99: Say what! If a reviewer has no knowledge or understanding of the tag beyond what the first comment says, they absolutely must select Skip rather than either Close or Keep Open. I do not judge MTG questions for this reason, as I am a very casual and occasional player; I request the same courtesy from MTG players with no knowledge of Contract Bridge beyond casual acquaintance with the rules.

It's hard to get an exact number, but there appear to be very few users on the entire site who both have substantial interaction with the [bridge] tag and have enough reputation to close questions, even though [bridge] is the second-most popular tag on the site. If we leave the moderation of that tag entirely to those users, no [bridge] question will ever be closed because you just won't have enough close voters around.

@murgatroid99: I concede the point; perhaps if non-Bridge players decline to cast the First close vote. Then only one of the four above would have been closed (Aryabata is definitely a competent Bridge player) and I could live with that. If we keep chasing Bridge players away we will never get to having a strong Bridge community here.

Ironically enough, not knowing enough about bridge, I just skipped your four reopen requests, before coming here to see what was going on.

@Radhil: If it sways your decision on any of these re-opens, I already have an answer posted for three of them - I am looking to invite additional answers for those, as well as to complement @Ruds answer regarding Smolen on the third for partnerships not prepared to play expert conventions.

@PieterGeerkens - didn't even know I could (I'm newish).  If you think you can move 'em forward, then sure, votes are now in.

Thank you for bringing these to my attention.
I reopened them all with some editing.  Only one deserved to be closed. I don't believe that any close votes were cast maliciously so this meta post is a great way to find some consensus.
People with the close vote privilege can absolutely do what they want.  My preference would be that folks consider their level of knowledge about the game before casting votes to close and abstain when they aren't sure and the post isn't dangerous to the site.
That said, I have a complaint/challenge to the bridge players on this site.
Your tag bridge is not awesome.  It reads like a wiki page.  That isn't what tag descriptions should be about.  A brief description of bridge is cool, but I wouldn't go much farther than the excerpt is doing now.
Use the extended tag info to tell people how the bridge tag is used on this site.  Describe how people should ask questions, including their level of knowledge, the bidding conventions used, etc.  It would also be great to standardize on how to describe the hand.
Done correctly, the first comment on each of those questions could then be a simple directive to look at the tag info for clarification.

Great idea Pat. I will check out the tag now and see how I can improve it.

The four questions have been fixed, and the people that read this meta post will likely show more restraint. What about everyone else? We need a long term fix.
Pat challenged the Bridge experts to improve the Bridge tag wiki. I think that is a step in the right direction, but how many people actually read the tag wikis?
I have a more visible solution. When a user clarifies the question in a comment, immediately move that clarification into the question. In addition, leave a comment to let the user know that the proper way to address comments is to edit the question.

Thank you for clarifying. I went ahead and added your clarification to the question. The question is clear to me now, but if you think of any additional details, be sure to add them to the question.

If I see that comment, I will think twice about close voting. I might even pick up your good editing and commenting behavior. Asking the users that read this meta post to show restraint is a short term solution. Demonstrating good behavior is a long term solution.

I have added a "How to ask a Bridge Question" section at the top of the Tag wiki. That can at least be used as a reference now. All comments and suggestions welcome. I also like your idea of being more diligent and prompt in moving comments up into the question, and will act on that going forward.

It's definitely good to edit clarifications into the question, and potential close voters are exactly the people who should be doing that. If someone votes to close without bothering to check the comments to see if they clarify sufficiently, they're probably being a bit too eager to close. It's understandable (it's easy to just read the title, skim the body, and ignore the comments) but we can do better.

This site takes a long time to get review tasks done in general and trying to limit who can do reviews on certain tags will only make it worse. Looking through the review history and I am seeing items that are close to a week old that still need votes on them to be completed.
Also looking at the questions.
In the first question you are making assumptions and state that in your answer which would suggest that the question is not clear enough and more information is needed to properly answer the question which is the close reason it got.
In the second question you also start your answer by making assumptions which should be a clear sign that not enough information was provided. In this case it was closed as to broad because the question could be answered in several different ways which you indicated in your answer.
In the third question you are asking a lot of questions in the comments which would make it seem that a lot of information is missing
The simple problem is that while it may be a "top" tag with 209 questions it has only 31 questions asked this year so there will be a smaller base of people who will be able to properly handle the questions which in the end most likely means that nothing will ever happen to those questions if left alone.

Part of the problem is that, everywhere, this always happens when bridge players ask a stronger player for advice. If I ask Joan Eaton (Canadian International whom I have known for 40 years) for advice on a hand where I have only remembered 40 or so of the cards, she will first chide and prod me to see if I can remember a couple more, then answer my question. This is part of the learning process for weaker players - that remembering more of the hand is probably more important for improving their play than the advice they are actually asking for; it doesn't mean the question is unanswerable

Coming mostly from 2 Stacks that are rabidly more active in every area, or others where I just view/browse due to lack of knowledge, my first inclination is never to look at the review queues because I'm used to nothing being there.  I also think this Stack is also more ..complicated?.. than first glance might suggest - if it's a unique product question, an answer may be simple but it requires direct experience. On the flip, if it's a question on an old classic, most general questions are long answered, and usually only true experts can pick it up.  It's a surprising bar for some, I bet.


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How to protect this site against a cabal that publishes, as "ovfficial" bizarre rules interpretations?
The Monopoly board-game question Do you still pay 10x the dice when getting the chance card that takes you to the nearest utility if the property is mortgaged? is an interesting one, but has an accepted answer that is both bizarre (to my mind) and based wholly on an unsubstantiated generalization from a comparison to one other Chance card.
A recent attempt (by yours truly) to refute this interpretation through deeper analysis of the published Official Rules was recently down-voted in a surprisingly quick manner for a site that gets only moderate activity outside MTG. The up-voted comment to this answer is :

Your answer seems to be based on an implicit assumption that the payment demanded by the card is rent, or that when that rule says "rent" it means "rent or other payments", but it doesn't say that and neither do the rules.

which has little semantic content besides "Rent is an undefined term, and your interpretation is wrong.", which hardly seems to actually advance the conversation.
Even supposing that the answer proposed by yours truly can be proven incorrect, I suggest that a detailed explanation of how the analysis proposed fails would be valuable. The comment made fails to do that.
I admit this is, to the best of my knowledge, an isolated incident. However it seems an inherent danger for any site on the Stack that serves a small self-selected community. How do we protect against such manipulation that is not actually sock-puppetting votes?

This site uses voting as a measure of correctness, so having the wrong answer voted up is an inherent and unavoidable risk. The system essentially invokes the wisdom of the crowd to avoid the problem in the general case. Finally, calling this "manipulation" is presumptuous: people disagree all the time; the fact that they disagree with you does not make them a "cabal" or imply that they are purposely manipulating results.

You've mistakenly interpreting the situation. You've started from a basic assumption your answer's totally correct. That's OK, that's where almost all answers start from. The voting community's disagreed, but rather than us being manipulated by sockpuppets or cabals, it's more commonly reasonable that (a) you're wrong, or (b) the voters are misinformed or using poor judgement in this scenario. (Both happen. The first one happens most often.)
Sometimes what we consider to be the popular opinion is not the answer that floats to the top, but lots of people believing it didn't make it correct; sometimes it's surprising but it doesn't follow that it's incorrect; sometimes it's nebulous and weird but that just means you should truthfully analyse what it really says first and if it totally sucks then suggest an alternative (but in doing so you accept the risk of people voting your answer down based on the alternative).
This is just business as usual, and while the vigilance is to be commended, this is a situation to just downvote and move on — there's no evidence of malintent here.
What if there really is sockpuppets and a cabal?
We have defences against voting fraud. Stack Exchange has a lot of mechanisms that detect voting irregularities. We have automatic detection of sock puppets. Lots of these things will result in account mergers or account destruction, and votes being deleted and reversed. You're sort of active on Meta Stack Exchange, but you might've missed out on all the times this got brought up in tags such as sock-puppets or gaming-the-system.
Even if those all fail, the voting community's a pretty big force to overcome without getting detected, so it'll usually fail or succeed only by slim margins. That's why larger voting communities are beneficial. Sometimes we lack large voting communities that understand a particular game, but that probably wasn't the case here.
If something seriously fishy has genuine likelihood of going down, do bring it up, but we'll tell you it's not when it's not.

Granted, my wording is probably over the top - it's a bad habit I am prone to. However, my belief is that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. The speed with which a low activity site put my post 3 in the hole seemed suspicious to me, so I flagged it. I further saw a flaw in the wisdom of the crowd assumption when no crowd actually exists, and thought I would raise that question as well. I have been wrong in the past and will be wrong in the future, but I rarely am unable to grasp an analysis of when and why I am wrong. ...

In this case I fail to see how a narrow generalization can supercede a deeper analysis of the entirety of the rules. However I enjoy the site and work to defend it.

@PieterGeerkens - re "Wisdom of the crowds" I get your point that MtG gets most of the traffic around here, but we've all played Monopoly .. a lot, although perhaps not a ton recently.  That makes it easier to cast a vote over the wide swath of games that come up that I haven't ever played.

Your answer originally relied on this interpretation:

No rent can be collected on mortgaged properties or utilities

... which you interpreted as...

No payment of any kind can be collected on mortgaged properties or utilities

You claim this is unequivocal evidence that your answer is correct. I think the argument is weak. Some agree with me; others agree with you. There is no evidence of a cabal, of sockpuppeting, or of any manipulation whatsoever.
The high quantity of votes is not surprising. The answers are extremely polarized, and everyone has played Monopoly.

The problem with your answer in this case it the assumptions you are making and having nothing to back them up them up then what you think. The question is asking about the results of a Chance card.

Advance token to nearest Utility. If unowned, you may buy it from the Bank. If owned, throw dice and pay owner a total ten times the amount thrown.

Now this card talks about paying the owner and does not mention that the payment is rent. This is important because for other cards they do make that claim.

Advance token to the nearest Railroad and pay owner twice the rental to which he/she {he} is otherwise entitled. If Railroad is unowned, you may buy it from the Bank.

Note there are other cards that do not include rent.

Take a trip to Reading Railroad {Take a ride on the Reading} – If you pass Go, collect $200
Advance to Illinois Ave. - If you pass Go, collect $200
Advance to St. Charles Place
Take a walk on the Boardwalk – Advance token to Boardwalk

Note that none of the above cards tell the user that they need to pay rent or can buy the property if it is unowned. It should also be noted that there is one card that makes you pay more for the rail road and one that doesn't.
Since the card instructing you to move to the utility does not mention rent it can easily be read that you would still need to pay the owner if it wasn't mortgaged. Also since it doesn't mention rent it could be read that you would need to pay rent in addition to what the card has you do as was brought up in your answer on the question.

When you land on property owned by another player,
  the owner collects rent from you in accordance with the list printed on
  its Title Deed card.

Note this rule does not say it matters how you got there so it doesn't matter if another card instructed you to go there and pay the owner. This can also be true for the card that instructs you to go to the nearest railroad and pay double the rent owed.
In the end it boils down to you having posted an answer on a question that has 5 similar answers which have all been downvoted (and one deleted) with nothing to back it up then how you think it reads. I am not sure why you expected anything else to happen after looking at the history of that question and answer.

I think anyone who hangs out on SE long enough has That Question — the one where you just know (or think you do) that the accepted or most-voted answers are terribly wrong, about a topic you've researched and care about strongly, but you've had to just shrug and move on.
It's a thing that'll happen in any kind of crowd-sourced knowledge project.
Heck, I've got, like, three of them now. ("RPG.SE IS WRONG ABOUT THE DEFINITION OF A ROLEPLAYING GAME," I will shout at you, if you ask.)
As I see it, your options are rather limited:

Try to improve your answer to make it more persuasive (not just bigger or more argumentative — clear, concise, well-argued, inviting). Like, really really dig into it, far and above the effort you'd normally put in.
Move on. File it away in the back of your mind as "Oh, yeah, That Question." Every now and then, you can drag it out as a little anecdote about how, haha, sometimes Stack Exchange gets it really wrong, you know.

Seems pretty clear that there's no "cabal" here, just a local consensus and a question that gets a bit more attention than most others in its category. (Note the number of answers on it!)