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Provide links to BGG, Wikipedia, or the official game page?
I find myself wanting to link to further information about a game or expansion fairly often. When describing something, it's nice to provide a link so the reader can find out more. But there are frequently several good choices of what to link to, and I'm not sure which to pick.
BoardGameGeek has a ton of information, including categorization of games, recommended numbers of players based on user votes, a description, reviews, discussion, file uploads for player aids and rule translations, and so on. On the other hand, the page is extremely busy, it can be hard to navigate, and you sometimes have to click through quite a lot to find all of the information it has to offer.
For many games, Wikipedia has a good article on the game. On Wikipedia, you have a much cleaner interface, and see pretty much all of the relevant information on one page. It doesn't have as much information on precisely categorizing games, reviews, ratings, or the like, but for the information it does provide, it can be easier to navigate. It also sometimes provides historical background or other information that BoardGameGeek does not or may be hard to find on BGG.
Then there's the official site for the game itself. These vary in quality; some of them just provide very basic information in the form of a blurb and a box cover. Some of them provide a good deal of information, like rules, strategy guides, errata, payer aids, and the like. They are generally promotional in nature, so you get to see how the company is trying to sell their game rather than what other people think about the game.
Another option is to link to Amazon or another online store. This allows anyone interested in the game to buy it right away, and will generally have some description and review information, but may not be appropriate for everyone on the site as other online stores might be more appropriate depending on their country.
When you're reading about a game in an answer, which of these sites do you prefer to get a link to? Is there a good rule of thumb about which link or links I should provide?

When I want to link to a page with further info I first visit boardgamegeek. If I can't find the game there I'll try wikipedia. Then I give up unless I really need that link.
The reasons why I prefer BoardGameGeek are:

It is more likely to know any particular game. Wikipedia lacks pages for many less mainstream games.
It is a site dedicated to games and almost always contains or links to more additional info (Images, Reviews, Discussions, Comparisons) than wikipedia.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and thus more interested in a game's origin, cultural impact and other aspects of it's "historic importance". BGG focuses on aspects that are of more immediate interest to gamers - such as:

a quick summary of the game concept
player count, duration, age suitability

It is easier to correctly identify the desired game it case of ambiguous names.

For these reasons I prefer BoardGameGeek over Wikipedia or the often very short official pages. I personally won't go an place multiple links to the same game on alternate sites - I'm too lazy for that. If the reader still needs more information after visiting the first link he should be able and motivated to find it himself.

I prefer to link to Wikipedia usually. My reasons are:
I find BGG too difficult to read and far too cluttered, so linking to it for someone looking for info, I think is a bad idea.
Linking to the game's web page is far too narrow. It rarely has the amount of information that a wikipedia page offers. Again, as a user of this site, I would prefer more information than less, as the reason I would ask a question is to gain as much information about the answer as I can find.
Wikipedia therefore wins, as it is uncluttered, easy to read, broad enough information to be more useful than the game website and BGG in most instances and more often than not has links to BGG and Wikipedia.
I concede that this will not always be the correct method, but 9 times out of 10, I think it is the most suitable.

Wikipedia has been systematically deleting game entries in the last two years. If it's not on the pop-culture radar, the administration there doesn't want it.

Why pick one link to favor?  Link to any or all as desired.  Example:

Settlers of Catanwiki BGG official led the German board game invasion in 1995.

This method has several advantages:

Allows the poster (or editor) to use only those links that are useful for each particular game
Allows linking to more than one place easily
Provides information as to where the link goes
Is easily extensible.  Links to any other site can be included if warranted.

I've done similar a few times; see, for instance, http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/1204/which-settlers-of-catan-expansion-packs-is-recommended/1219#1219 in which I link to all three. But it's a bit clumsy to do so, so I wanted to poll people to see what their preferences are; nothing needs to be mandated, I just want to find out what people find works best.

@Brian - mandate might have been a bit strong (I've reworded that part).  Realistically all we can do is encourage our editors to standardize and hope for the best.

I have to concur with Brian here; linking to all may be appropriate on occasion but it's clumsy, as well as being more work than I want to do.  I have a mild preference for BGG (much less readable but more likely to lead to useful game resources) but I agree it's worth going for a site concensus.

@Tynam - ah, I had not meant to suggest that all should be mandated (or even encouraged).  Editing post now.

okay, how do you get the "small" superscript links?  Do you code it by hand or am I missing some mark-up in the BGC editor?

@egg use BGG and then link the text.

@Pat Thanks. I will incorporate this into my posts.

I like this linking strategy. Is there any way the editor for this SE could be customized to support and encourage it? I know that I link with namelink because it's quick and easy - faster than the button for a link, even. But if we have standards we want to push, we should try to assure that our tools encourage them.

Reasons I suggest for links to Board Game Geek:

depth of database. Almost anything in print is in there, and lots that's out of print, including some little known games from a century ago. (EG: The Checkered Game Of Life (1860))
depth of user base provides for a generally more useful set of views
collection of information present on the main page of a given game:

versions available
internal links to reviews
external links to other websites relating to the game
internal links to similar games
internal links to supplements, expansions, and rethemes
generalized rating, and access to more detailed information about that rating
links to ebay auctions and BGG marketplace
targeted adverts by gamestores (yes, they can target pages of stuff they carry)

Extensive designer participation

lots of semi-official rules Q&A
a good amount of designer commentary

BGG Drawbacks:

Hard to navigate for new users
sometimes, too much info.
very responsive to DMCA notices (Anything related to games by Games Workshop gets gutted every couple years, it seems.)

Wikipedia, I don't recommend. In part, because it focuses almost exclusively on the social impact, and in larger part, because the management has been systematically targeting and removing pages about board and roleplaying games over the last two years. Further, many of the board game pages are not terribly accurate in their mechanical summaries.
Publisher pages are good links if there are FAQs or designer's notes, but not for game recommendations, nor, in many cases, links to point of sale. Further, almost all reviews on a publisher's pages will be positive, no matter how bad the game. A neutral site is far better for presenting balanced information.

Do you feel it is important to attempt to mandate a particular link destination?

No, I don't. But in cases like wikipedia, it's a good idea to bar particular sites as generally unacceptable.

I prefer Boardgamegeek, it's busy, but it will have all the info anyone wants.


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Chat is now available
It looks like chat has been turned on for BCGSE now. This gives us another, more casual place to discuss anything related to boardgames or the site. There appear to be two rooms that have been created linked to BCGSE, but I'd recommend using the "Board and Card Games" room for the least confusion.
So stop on by and say "hi". Good topics for discussion might be how to help grow the site, migrating any long comment threads that might better be handled in chat than in comments, or anything else that we need to do that's more discussion oriented than Q&A oriented.
Any suggestions for other good uses of chat?

Maybe it's just Firefox, but I'm getting a "The page isn't redirecting properly" error when clicking on the link

@LittleBobbyTables I am too, now, in both Safari and Chrome. I was just about to report this on meta.so, and now that you've confirmed it, I'm less worried that it's just me.

Oh, there's already a thread about the problem: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/69169/cant-access-chat-se-multiple-browsers-deliver-a-too-many-redirects-browser-er

Yeah, I didn't see it either... it didn't seem immediately related, but oh well, at least they're aware of it.

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Can I just invite someone over to join the beta, or do they need to sign into area51?
Can I just forward the Link to people i want to join the community, or is this really a closed Beta?

Until the beta opens in a week's time, the only people allowed in are people who committed to the proposal on Area 51 before the beta started.

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Dominion Card Specific Tags
I'm wondering... Should specific tags should be allowed.  Ie. dominion-card-loan or something like that.
It would generate a lot of extra tags, but I would love to be able to click on a card specific tag and see a list of questions related to that card.
Right now it's not that big of a deal as the number of questions is pretty low, but further on down the road I can see it being useful.

If you can show evidence that you are unable to find the information you seek with the current search and organization scheme, then a tag is usually justified. However, I think the search features will let you do this just fine. :D

Not really intersted in searching for something specific.  Just more interested in seeing a list of questions related to a specific cards as needed.  Kinda of a "things to know" before any questions come up in a game.

what exactly do you want to search for? If you give us some specific examples I'm sure we can help you find what you need with the existing tools. :)

No -- I think it makes more sense to use search for this, and you can scope search to a specific tag, like so:
https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bdominion%5D+loan
in other words, enter
[tag] searchterm1 searchterm2
in the search box in the upper right (or press enter in the search box to get search help)

Is there anyway to just search the questions and not the answers?

@chris search always rolls up to the question anyway, but you can experiment with the advanced search operators that are on the "press enter to get there" page -- http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/search


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Game Company Tag too non-specific?
So I saw a question today about Starbase Jeff (a great game) from Cheapass Games. The game is tagged Starbase Jeff however it's very unlikely to generate more questions since the rules are simple and well written, and therefore unlikely to generate questions... However there are plenty of other Cheapass Games out there... Might it be worth making a Cheapass-Games tag?

Why? What would be the benefit of an umbrella tag for games by this company? For example, are they all mechanically similar, so that questions about one are likely to be relevant to the others?

I just did a quick check of the tag pages and I didn't look at every single one, but it looks like we have 200+ tags with only a single question. So this  is not a thing that we have issues with.

Related: Is tag:avalonhill a good tag?

Many companies have varied games, and a company-specific tag doesn't make sense
As of this writing, there is one question each for trivial-pursuit, trouble-despicable-me, and words-with-friends. Should we replace them all with hasbro since they are all published by the same company? I don't see the value of that, since they are such different games (to be frank, I'd be surprised to find someone who has played all of them).
There is the meta discussion Is tag:avalonhill a good tag? where there is the argument that because Avalon Hill creates games that are similar in style that it should exist (frankly, I disagree with that, but that's another matter). Still, nobody in that discussion advocated replacing the game tags with avalon-hill. Instead, the question was over whether or not it should be there in addition to the game tag.
There's a fair chance that we would want to add game-specific tags back in in the future
Who's to say that there won't be more questions?
Consider the tag thebes. The first question was in April 2013, and someone might have had this same meta discussion about that game then. It wasn't until 3 1/2 years later that we got two more questions for the game. We don't know what sort of questions there will be in the future, so it's quite possible that there will be new questions.
Say for example a new version of Starbase Jeff comes out. A question very well might be "What is different between Starbase Jeff first and second editions?".
Even simple games can get lots of questions

The game is tagged Starbase Jeff however  it's very unlikely to generate more questions since the rules are simple and well written

Consider that as of this writing, we have 10 questions for jenga, 8 questions for tic-tac-toe, and 4 questions for connect-four. These are some of the simplest games I know, and yet there are plenty of questions already. You'd be surprised to find out what questions people can ask.

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Are questions where the first result of a Google search has the answer good questions?
Sometimes a question is trivial to answer with a Google search or two, but the answer is not on a stackexchange site. Are those questions still worth asking on SE or should they be closed?

Meta.stackoverflow.com has a lot of questions discussing this issue.
I can remember an answer posted for someone. It says something like that:
We must try to put the question as the first link on Google.
So, we should answer the question and spread it to lift the answer to first place.
At least this is the ideal scenario.

No, I don't think we should. If there already is a good answer that's at the top of Google, then there's no reason to make a StackExchange answer which just repeats what that says the top hit on Google. We should be trying to promote the questions with good content; content that might not be written down anywhere else, or explained as well. We should try and promote our best questions and answers, not the simple ones where you find the answer from the top Google hit, like this which adds almost nothing: http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/885/what-does-it-mean-to-be-furiten/887#887

@Brian: I will think about it and bring some links to back my post.

+1, we should have a goal of being the ultimate repository for boardgaming Q&A.

If someone asks such a question, we should answer them, proving the link and a quote or summary that demonstrates that the link answers the question. These are easy questions to get some easy rep on.
On the other hand, they don't make for very interesting content on this site, so we should try not to have too many of them. In particular, try Googling before you ask a question, and don't try to "seed" the site with lots of questions that can be answered this way.
See the "Links to BoardGameGeek (or other sites)" thread for some discussion on how best to provide these sorts of answers for things which are adequately answered by an existing link already.


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Should we try to generate basic questions?
It seems like a lot of the questions we have so far are fairly esoteric or advanced. Should we make an effort to populate the site with more basic questions in order to build up a good knowledge base? In other words, should we start asking questions that we may already know the answer to, just to get the information documented? For example, a question like "What is castling in chess?" I know the answer, but having answers like that might help bring more traffic to the site.

See the blog for a semi-official answer.
My process on RPG is if the question legitimately came up during the game, and we weren't able to quickly locate the rule and decided to move on, then I will post it on SE.  Even if someone googled the answer while I was driving home and emailed it out.
I don't think we should seed the site with questions that we think people might be looking for.  We're closing in on 200 questions after just one week.  Soon, the private beta will be over.  Let's concentrate on getting quality answers and making sure that as many questions get answered as possible.

"Seeding" the site with basic questions is almost certainly a bad idea. The blog entry that Pat linked to does a pretty good job of explaining why. Also, someone has already tried "seeding" the site with every question he could think of about poker, which wound up taking up the whole front page and frustrating a lot of people.
Formulaic basic questions just aren't what StackExchange is good for. Sure, you might get a few good answers; most likely, you'll just get a lot of answers pointing to somewhere else where the question is already answered. And then we'll have the site seeded with a whole bunch of content that's just links to Wikipedia or BoardGameGeek; and anyone who looks will wonder "Why would I use this site? Why wouldn't I just google, I can find better answers that way."
The best questions to ask are those that you actually need solved. Then you can provide better guidance to those answering as to whether they are helpful or not. If you know the answer to something, it would be much better to just write up a FAQ, or a blog entry, or a wiki page; if there's something you know that you want to share, then do so, but there's no reason to ask it as a question. Questions should be for approaching something from an angle that hasn't been explored before, or for when you're confused by an explanation and want clarification from an expert, or you just can't figure out how to find the needle of the one piece of information that's on some webpage that hasn't been updated since 1997 and shows up on the 6th page of all of the obvious Google searches, or you know that the answer must be simple and you keep on looking at the rules and it doesn't make sense and you just need someone to point out the completely obvious thing that you're missing.
Now, you can do a certain amount of seeding, by asking questions that you've actually had in the past; something that you were wondering about, or some issue that bothered your group for a while, or something that came up and you've left unresolved for a while. If you want to contribute good questions, think back to real questions that it's taken you a while to solve, or you haven't solved, or you needed to ask someone else who was an expert in the topic to solve.

I have asked a few questions that I personally already know the answers to, but which come up frequently with new players of those games or in other groups.  They're questions that maybe I WOULD have solved by coming here when I first encountered the issue, had this site existed.

Seeding is bad because there are only so many answerers around, and by seeding you drain both their resources (time to answer questions) and their motivation (because the questions aren't genuine).
An exception could be made for questions that are enjoyable to answer, and lead to interesting discussions (e.g. strategy questions).


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Tag for closed questions?
Does it make sense to create a tag for closed questions? I'm not sure it does, but it occurred to me because I thought it might be nice to put that tag on my ignore list.

No, absolutely not. This would be a meta tag and we'd remove it instantly.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/
If the site has a problem with too many [closed] questions, that's symptomatic of other issues (scope mainly). I don't think that's the case here.

No it's not the case here. Just a thought. Understood.

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Community Wiki: desirable or not?
I am wondering what the attitudes towards the community wiki concept are.
I personally consider it overused and mostly undesirable. I'm now probably on Joel's personal execution list but let me explain why I feel this way:
I am not a user who can farm the site 24/7 for new questions to answer. Many traditional questions get their correct answer quite quickly so in most situations I'm left with:

voting up answers
the occasional comment
the even rarer exotic question that does not yet have an answer and I happen to actually know something about it
and the kind of questions that cannot be fully answered

The only kind of questions I can reliably contribute to are the ones that - according to official policies from the founders - should be community wiki. Their reasoning is that CW fosters contribution. I don't see it that way - exactly the opposite actually.

Contributing to CW earns me no recognition. Don't get me wrong - virtue IS it's own reward but when you are given the choice between receiving recognition for your help or not: what do you prefer? The entire SE/SO system is so focused on rep. Everything depends on how much rep you have.
Anyone can answer a question but you need 100 rep to contribute to CW so you are actually shutting members out that probably would like to help.

So what am I saying about CW? What is it good for IMO? For "moderators" to condense discussions into separate posts. Nothing else comes to mind right now.

Looking at questions like this (and the answers to these types of questions), you can see why, for all intents and purposes, there is no more community wiki.
So many people are overly fixated on "counting pennies" when it comes to the arbitrary valuation and accumulation reputation. People have long since lost sight of what wiki was supposed to be about. Even if you could explain to a new (or even an average) user the merits of foregoing ownership in lieu of allowing a broader range of editing, the rules and almost-metaphysical philosophy applied to the feature simply aren't worth the complexity, problems, and abuse it causes.
So from @Jeff's post on Meta.SO: Important Change
Important change
End users can not mark questions wiki anymore, so the only appropriate way to get action on a question you believe really should be wiki, is to flag it for moderator attention.

A couple points..

Vote-to-wiki will not be implemented. When the answer to a problem is "let's make things arbitrarily more complicated", it is rarely the correct answer.
Do not bully users into community wiki. You can offer a carrot in the form of a comment that says "wow, I'd love to vote this up if it was community wiki" but downvoting and other nagging is not appropriate. (addendum: the community wiki flag checkbox is not shown for new users because they can't possibly understand it, you may potentially be nagging new users about a setting they don't even have.)
If you think something should be community wiki then flag it for mod attention with a comment to that effect. Simple.

Also, note that as of now the CW edit threshold has been reduced from 750 rep to 100 rep on all sites.

I used it in the "Basic Dominion Strategies" thread when I contributed 3 or 4 separate answers as of way of saying:

I am not trying to farm rep here
Please add additional details to these strategies that I have forgotten

But I had the luxury of doing that and having a bit of rep already.


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When should expansion tags be used?
If a question involves an expansion to a game, should the expansion always be tagged? What if the expansion is obvious from the question or title? Or, should expansions generally not be tagged?

I just tagged a Dominion question I asked because it involved two specific cards from two specific expansions to be used in conjunction.  I feel that was correct, as knowledge of the base Dominion set won't give you the knowledge you need to answer the question.

My view is the more information the better. Some expansions can change the rules and tiles, options, cards etc of a game and can make an answer incorrect because of the amount of information supplied. Tags help to properly categorise the question and allow people to keep an eye out for, or ignore questions that they know they cannot answer.
So my vote would be yes, use tags as much as possible.

Tags are good for setting interesting and ignored tags, to have some questions highlighted and some greyed out. If someone is interested in Settlers of Catan, they might follow the settlers-of-catan tag. If, however, they have never played the Cities and Knights expansion, they might not want to bother reading questions involving it, and so set the cities-and-knights tag to ignored. That way, they can quickly scan the questions, paying particular attention to the the Settlers questions but being able to see that they can skip the ones about the Cities and Knights expansion explicitly.
Tags can also be helpful when someone wants to look for questions on a particular topic; they can browse questions tagged with that. If you just put the expansion in the title, and don't tag it, then it won't show up in that list when people are looking for it.
So, I'd say that if the question is about the expansion, and can only be answered with knowledge of the expansion or is only of interest to someone who wants to know about the expansion, then tag it as such. If it's just a general Settlers question, that might happen to mention the expansion in passing, then it doesn't need to be so tagged, though depending on the context it might be useful.
But yes, do tag with expansions, even it it's obvious from the title.

Understanding that this is an old question ... a consistent direction across Stack Exchange sites is to use as few tags as possible, keeping in mind that this is not always followed, particularly on the original trio.
One issue with adding tags is that they can easily become redundant. Take seafarers-of-catan, for example. All seven questions so far are also tagged with settlers-of-catan ... the only thing we gain right now by using the expansion tag is the ability for people to follow it, and only 5 are following Seafarers so far. catan-cities-and-knights is the same: 9 questions, all also tagged with Settlers.
Part of the problem is that there are few questions about expansions that I can imagine that don't also involve the base game. If every Seafarers question is also about Settlers, do we accomplish anything by using both tags?
The other part of the problem, I think, is that we don't have any "series" tags, so questions about a family of games are lumped in with the original game, and we end up with a number of questions that are, in effect, "randomly" tagged: they may apply to other games in the series as well, but aren't tagged that way because the OP doesn't have them ... and if we tag with each expansion, eventually we'll run out of tags.
See these questions as examples:

Fixing warped board pieces - applies to all Settlers sets
Can You Buy a Catan Border That Fits? - same
Is drawing resources required? - specifically asks about Settlers, Cities and Knights, and Fishermen, but isn't tagged with Fishermen

A settlers-of-catan-series tag would make it easier to tag questions like that.
I guess after thinking it through, I support Brian's position with a few suggestions.
Questions about a single expansion
Are progress cards awarded if the barbarian strength is 0?
Largest Army in Settlers of Catan: Cities and Knights
In Seafarers of Catan, are there any special rules for ships or harbors in lakes?

Do tag with the expansion, even if it's included in the title. Tags should be the primary way to follow games/expansions; having the game/expansion in the title is fine if it's worked in naturally, but don't write "Seafarers - does such-and-such apply?"
Don't tag with the base game. The assumption is that all questions tagged with expansion Y are saying "expansion Y as part of base game X".

Questions about multiple expansions and the related base game
Catan : Multiple extension combination
Can You Buy a Catan Border That Fits?
Fixing warped board pieces

Don't tag with expansions.
Don't tag with the base game.
Do tag with the series.

Of course if that turns out to be the consensus, we would have to determine how to create series tags, and like on Gaming, that will create some issues. settlers-of-catan-series works fine, battlestar-galactica-series is too long. (25 characters is a hard limit and is unlikely to be changed sitewide.)


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What is the preferred format for tagging expansions?
I noticed there are currently tags like catan-cities-and-knights and dominion-alchemy, but also seafarers-of-catan and pegasus. Should expansion tags be prefixed with the core game name? If so, should it be catan-cities-and-knights or settlers-of-catan-cities-and-knights? The latter seems rather lengthy, but when would it be ok to abbreviate? Would catan-seafarers-of-catan be redundant?

Just noticed that the expansion is not called Seafarers of Catan (which is what I've always called it for some reason). It's Catan Seafarers.

Over on SmarterGamer we would have done settlers-of-catan, seafarers-expansion. Not sure I think that's best, just how we did it there.

I think we should have a single tag for the game and a tag for the expansion. Just like dealing with languages and versions on SO.
So you should have setlers-of-catan (or short catan) and seafarers, cities-and-nights, possibly even: expansion-seafarers and seafarers-cities-and-nights.

That works fine until two games end up having expansions with identical names.  If that happens, you've suddenly linked two games that have nothing to do with each other with a common tag.

Oh, I forgot to mention, an expansion could have the same name as a completely different game.  For example, Dominion's expansions would have tags of intrigue, seaside, alchemy, and prosperity... of those, I could see all but seaside as conflicting with games of the same name.

I think the question should be tagged with the common name of the expansion (like dominion-alchemy or seafarers-of-catan) and tagged with the name of the parent game (like dominion or settlers-of-catan).
We shouldn't go out of the way to format the expansion's tag to include the parent game's name if that's not how people refer to it.  If the game is called "Seafarers of Catan" I don't see a need to jam "Settlers of Catan" into the Seafarers tag.

The problem with going with the manufacturer's official name for stuff is that it's sometimes rather lengthy. For example, the tag using the official full name of the BSG Pegasus expansion would be: battlestar-galactica-the-board-game-pegasus-expansion. Obviously that's a bit excessive.

Yeah, okay, that's not quite what I meant.  I'll try to rephrase.  My intent was more that if they call it "Seafarers of Catan" we shouldn't go crazy trying to shoehorn "Settlers of Catan" in there too.

I think there's more benefit than detriment to lean toward having the base game and expansion be in the same tag. Powerlord has pointed out that having multiple different games refer to the same tag unnecessarily links two different games. If I search for such a tag and find 1200 questions under it, I get no visibility into just how many questions pertain to it, whereas if we have one tag per game and one tag per game+expansion, it's immediately clear. The only downside I see is a long tag such as "arkham-horror-curse-of-the-dark-pharaoh" which is long but easily forgivable in exchange for the clarity, in my opinion.  The only issue is the tag size limit prevents this (and I don't know how easy it is to appeal to have it lengthened).

Three tags: [game], [expansion] name and the tag "expansion".

I think expansion adds nothing here, personally.  We should be wary of too many tags.


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Should we have tags for various parts of Magic?
It looks like several people have started creating tags for various mechanics in Magic (protection, bestow) and retagging existing questions with them.  On Arqade, these types of tags have been removed because they mean different things in different games, and thus it doesn't make sense to have a "protection" tag for Magic that doesn't explicitly state that it is for magic (such as "magic-protection").
Is this something we're encouraging on this site, and if so, why are we choosing to disregard the lessons learned on Arqade?

What are the lessons from Arqade? Could you provide an explanation or links for those of us who don't use that site?

You can get to all sorts of discussion on the topic from http://meta.gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/3800/have-we-not-been-clear-enough-that-meta-tags-are-a-bad-thing%E2%84%A2.  Of note is the answer from Jeff Atwood, one of the founders of Stack Exchange.  One could argue that Magic now meets the question number threshold, which is why I think a specific tag like magic-protection might make sense.

The full name of the game is Magic the Gathering so any subtags should use the syntax "mtg-[mechanic]".

Also, I think a good (accepted) answer to this post should be a suggestion on how to "sub" tag MTG.  As a user mentions below, there are too many mechanics in MTG for each to have a subtag, however, there could be a good comprehensive answer which breaks MTG down into quality subtag components.

At this point, I don't know that I can accept an answer unless a moderator steps in and makes a decision.  I just wanted to raise the discussion.  As often happens in cases like this, it seems the community is divided.  I'd at least say that we shouldn't create more tags for Magic at this point until we've agreed on a plan of how best to do so.

@bwarner Sure, there's not consensus, but given the voting on the answers, I think it's pretty clear where the majority opinion lies - and it's not really the place of moderators to override voting on meta (without really strong reasons anyway). We can always revisit it if, say, someone comes up with a concrete proposal for which tags we'd want.

I agree with you, but Arqade is also my home site, so that's not surprising. I think we should not have a protection tag, for the reasons you mention.
I also think we should not have a magic-protection tag, or any similar tag that refers to a specific rule of the game. This is for three reasons:

Nobody is an expert in "protection." Playing Magic and knowing where to look for rules references effectively makes someone an expert in Magic in general, but there's no reason that someone would know just the rules for one specific part of the game without having significant general knowledge of how the game works.
There is no reason to search for magic-protection. It's not necessary to find a particular question about protection; that could just as easily be accomplished by searching [magic the gathering] is:question protection, plus other relevant search terms. And it wouldn't really be useful for getting an overview of how protection works. That could be more easily accomplished by reading What does protection from [quality] do?.
As Jefromi points out, tags may not be added consistently, which can actually worsen search experience. If we have tags for some keyword abilities but not others, and for some ability words but not others, and that choice is made based on site activity, it makes this problem much worse. If a new user asks a question, they would have to attempt to tag it with every ability the question is actually about to properly tag the question. As question volume grows, this could even make it difficult for experienced editors, who would have to know every keyword that has a tag to recognize when a question is missing one. In addition, a question that asks about the interaction between five different keyword abilities (I'm sure it's possible) would be impossible to tag correctly if all those abilities have tags. All of these are parts of the same problem: in the context of search, a tag should allow someone to find all questions about that topic; with these sorts of tags, that may be difficult or even impossible to accomplish.

Your answer doesn't describe even a single benefit. It only discusses the downsides. Is this because you did not consider the benefits, or because you truly think there are none?

I don't see any benefits to having the tag. This answer is an honest representation of how I see that tag on this site.

Another downside: these kinds of tags will tend to be really unevenly applied. People posting questions won't generally think to tag beyond the name of the game, so we'd be setting ourselves up for a lot of retagging for little to no benefit.

Does it add value to the site?
Yes.
If I want to search for all questions that are tagged magic-the-gathering and protection, I currently do not have a way to do that. Therefore, creating a protection tag would add at least some value to the site.
Nearly half of the questions on this site are about Magic. Contrary to the other answer, some players are much more intimately familiar with some parts of the game than with others. For example, I am probably more familiar with the Infraction Procedure Guide than I am with the Layer System in Magic.
You could argue that additional tags decrease the value of the site by polluting it. I would counter this with two points:

You don't have to favorite the protection tag, so it won't pollute your sidebar.
Most magic the gathering questions only have one tag.

Can it stand alone?
No.
Across all games, protection generally means "defense against something". However, when paired with a supporting tag, the meaning changes drastically. For example, "protection" means something incredibly specific in Magic.
Stack Overflow has a garbage-collection tag. This tag is almost always paired with a language tag such as c# or java. However, unlike "protection", "garbage collection" pretty much means the same thing in every language.
So what's the conclusion?
I think that although it adds value to the site, its inability to stand alone really kills it as a tag, and therefore it should not be added.

A question about protection really should have the word "protection" somewhere in the body, which is what that search looks for. And my point was that you said "I currently do not have a way to do that." I disagreed with that statement.

@murgatroid99 Well, my answer no longer says that, so we should clean up our comments.

Now it effectively says "Without the [protection] tag, I can not search for questions tagged [protection]" which is tautological and therefore meaningless. You could just as easily say "If I want to search for all questions that are tagged [magic-the-gathering] and [foo], I currently do not have a way to do that. Therefore, creating a foo tag would add at least some value to the site."

Unless you give a reason that someone would search for questions tagged [protection], the analogy is perfect. You say that some players are more familiar with some parts of the game than others. But most questions are answered while still on the front of the new questions page, and there is exactly one unanswered [magic-the-gathering] question right now, so finding unanswered questions to answer in a more specific area of expertise is extremely easy even without a more granular search.

Regarding your latest edit: the search I give in my question has 32 results. It's easy enough to look through all of them without having another tag to search with. You say this tag would add value, but I don't see how it's better than what we already have.

@murgtroid99 I didn't say it was better. In fact, my conclusion clearly states that I think we should not add this tag. Instead of recognizing that adding the tag has its pros and cons, you are just aggressively attacking every pro you see in my answer. I just wanted to write a more balanced answer.

Only about half of the questions in that search are actually about protection, so I'll concede that some people may see that as a benefit. I didn't address it in my answer because I don't see it as a pro.

@murgtroid99 Your very first comment is invalidated by your most recent one. "my answer provides a perfectly good way to search for MTG questions about protection" followed by "Only about half of the questions in that search are actually about protection". Since when is about half considered perfectly good? I've rolled back my answer in light of this new discovery.

(not a proper answer, but to long for a comment)
Normally I would say no to such a proposal, but in this case means to and end reasoning compels me to support such a feature.
I feel that we have too many MTG questions that really should be marked as duplicates of other questions, but because they mention different keywords or cite different specific cards they are often not marked as such despite having the same or nearly identical answers. How many answers do we have to copy the same rules text snippet into before we admit we have a problem?

I'd like a better way to deal with this too, but this just seems to be part of resolving MTG questions, unfortunately. We've got 1298 MTG questions, which is a lot, but not that many considering the number of MTG mechanics. A lot of them ask about the same mechanics as others, which means we have to revisit those mechanics over and over, but we haven't been asked before about those particular mechanics in that particular combination in that particular gameplay situation and so on. It's not ideal, and I wonder if there's more we could do about it.

If questions are about different keywords, this proposal won't help find duplicates. Plus, questions are not duplicates just because they have the same answer.

@murgatroid99 for keywords, sure this will not significantly help find dups, but with things like priority, turns phases, and the stack I am confident it will help significantly.

@murgatroid99 for dupe answers, sure it is not always the case. If 2 questions ask the same thing but with different specific context I would make an argument for them being dupes. Maybe this is an argument for editing out specifics that are not crucial to the question (specific creature or ability text for example) and replacing them with generic terms, idk.

In regards to your latest comment, you might want to check out the discussion on this question.

Honestly, I am unconvinced that having more tags will actually make it easier to find duplicates, even if we somehow have every single question tagged correctly.

I think some tags could add value. These would be tags in the form of mtg-something, because they only have meaning for magic.
These tags would be useful mainly to avoid false positives when searching. Yes, it's true that a question  about protection will probably say protection in the question. But a lot other questions could say that too, even if they really are not about protection.
These tags would be much more useful for topics other that protection. A question about state based actios, for example, is unlikely to say state based actions in the title or question, because new players don't know these terms, even if the question is about that. And even if the answers has the words state based action, searching for that could result in a lot of false positives, because people could be citing rules that say it even if the question is not really related to that topic.
I remember how difficult have been sometimes to search for rulings in some forums about magic. For example, if I wanted to search for rulings about events and replacement effects for those events, that is really hard. I usually started searching for references to rule numbers, or specific cards that I know could have an interaction, and that would give lots and lots of false positives that I needed to weed out.

Yes, I think we should have these. (Naturally, since I added a couple of them.)
Having categorisation tags for MTG would be helpful, whether of the format of [protection] et al, or [mtg-protection] et al (subtagging, as suggested and adopted on Arqade). People here seem concerned about picking up the former format, so we can go with the latter: Jeff Atwood suggests the latter would be legitimate under circumstances that are the case for MTG questions here (loads of questions, loads of potential tags).
I added those tags because we have virtually no categorisation among our MTG questions, and that makes them very burdensome to sort or search through, and that isn't a good situation. A similar tag system has worked exceptionally well on a site I'm a long-term user of. I would consider it a major loss in potential gain for the site if we weren't able to apply a similar system here, and it was enforced that MTG should have no mechanical tags at all, considering it also does no damage to the site for being present.
It adds value to the site
Like Rainbolt described. I can use tags like this to search for particular questions I'm after that are about Protection or other mechanics.
murgatroid99 suggests searching for MTG questions that mention protection is just as good, but it isn't: a lot of false positives turn up which are questions that are not about protection, but just happen to mention the word somehow. Heck, Are there any good intermediate deck building resources available in magic turns up as a result, because the person is talkng about protecting against various strategies. The tag itself adds distinct value not achievable without it.
This searchability is value for regular SE users, who can use it to dig through questions on a topic for reference/linkage/citation or to aid in identifying duplicates. It also has value for new players, who could do the same thing to check if their kind of question has been asked before. (Many will not do this, but for those users there is no net damage caused by the tag's presence.)
The non-standalone nature does not matter much
I say that from experience on RPG Stack Exchange. Take a look at our front page, and you'll see loads of tags that describe categories of mechanics that exist in particular games. Many of these cannot stand alone. stress, aspects, natural-weapons and so on are close to meaningless outside the context provided by another tag, for instance. However, this is fine: the tags still provide excellent categorisation value, and we find them very helpful, and the fact we might never answer a question with that tag alone doesn't really cause any trouble. (We have a very active and self-reflective meta community. We're keenly aware of problems with several of our tags. These aren't among them.)

This could set precedent for adding tags for various ability keywords. Since there's a lot of those (106!) and many other named mechanics (e.g. creatures, legendaries, and so on) this could open up us to an awful lot of tags.
However, that does not necessarily mean that all of these potential tags will ever be created. Like RPG.SE, we should still follow the policy that tags are only added when someone finds it useful to add them, and tags aren't generally useful until there's a lot of questions on a topic.
For many ability keywords, we simply do not have any questions at all (e.g.
amplify,
rampage,
horsemanship,
modular,
fear)
or will be unlikely to get very many (e.g.
banding,
phasing
— the more of these I searched for, the more keywords I found we just don't have questions about).
That leaves us with many ability keywords that will simply never have a tag anytime soon.

I notice that the tags that have been recently added are [bestow], [heroic], and [protection]. Would you say that this should set a precedent for adding a tag for each of 26 ability words and each of the 106 keyword abilities?

I would also like to note that tags that mean different things in different contexts are not considered to be acceptable on most StackExchange sites. StackOverflow (where this is most easily seen due to high question volume) routinely deletes or disambiguates tags with multiple meanings. Arqade also follows this policy, and to my knowledge has no tags that can be used on different questions with substantially different meanings.

@murgatroid99 Yes, it's not acceptable on most Stack Exchange sites. We are not Most Stack Exchange Sites, we're this one, and can make our own policy decisions, based on what works well uniquely here. On RPG.SE, it works extremely well. There's precedent both ways.

@murgatroid99 Re adding tags, it sets a precedent we could add those tags, but does not mean they will necessarily be added (ever). On RPG.SE, we employ the usual policy that tags don't need to be added until someone finds it useful to add them. They're not generally useful to have unless there's a lot of questions on each topic. But if we do have that many, it's going to be pretty useful to have a tag about it to help search for that topic separate from the droves of other MTG questions. Note RPG.SE only has tags for classes that get a lot of questions, but there are many tagless classes.

You are right that we can make our own policy, but there is often a reason why the majority makes the choice they do, and we shouldn't just blithely disregard that. Since you don't think we should immediately add tags for all of the things I mentioned, can you explain what makes the tags you added different? For example, why did you add the [heroic] tag to 2 of the 14 questions returned when searching for the word "heroic" in [magic-the-gathering] questions, and what value does the tag add when every single question there would have the tag?

@murgatroid99 I added two because tags on just one question get auto-destroyed. I did not add it to all fourteen because (a) I was testing the waters, and (b) the front page had just been bombarded by [tag:bestow] being added to 18 questions, I wasn't about to do that again immediately. I added that tag in particular because we are recently getting a lot of questions on the topic, one of which was active and brand new, and so it adds immediate value. And to "every single question in the search [for the plain keyword] would have that tag", that will naturally be the case for some tags.

I understand. In that case, what waters were you testing that were not already probed by the additions of the [bestow] and [protection] tags (the latter of which has been reversed, by the way)?

@murgatroid99 Dude, I added two instances of two tags - protection and heroic. What is the point to this grilling?

You suggested creating some of these tags but not others based on whether they would be useful. I was trying to understand why you thought that the tags you did create were useful. Also, regarding your recent edit about other sites' policies, I think you're fighting a straw man. I didn't say that we should choose this policy because other sites do; there's just no good reason to expect that the reasons they had for making that decision are any less valid for us.

@murgatroid99 I don't know those reasons. I understand Stack Overflow's choice at least. The question mentions lessons from Arqade, but doesn't explain what those are.   Meanwhile I use a site that has come to different conclusion. And man, all I was trying to do was help the site. That's it. I found those tags useful because we have many questions about it.

I'm sorry for responding so harshly. I'm just trying to help the site too. I think this is a bad idea, and a bad precedent to set. Honestly, the ambiguous tag issue isn't even that relevant to our particular situation, so I won't belabor the point. The primary reason for avoiding them, as far as I've seen, is the one you mention in your answer: the tag alone doesn't represent a cohesive topic or area of expertise. The lesson Arqade learned is to avoid that issue by prefixing the tag with the game name, which is why we have [tf2-spy] and [diablo-3-monk].

So why then is [magic-x] or [mtg-x] a bad idea? I would be happy with those too, honestly. As I've mentioned I'm not satisfied with just searching for the word, it isn't reliable on account of the false positives it turns up.

@murgatroid99 Now that I understand the context better, I've heavily revised this answer.

Do you think tagging would make search consistent enough to be worth it? We'd have a ton of retagging old questions, and probably plenty on new ones too. And then there's the issue of knowing which mechanics have tag names and which don't...

In case it wasn't clear - I think searching by text with lots of false positives is better than searching by tag with a significant number of false negatives, since you'd ultimately fall back to searching by text anyway. It's possible it's not a big deal and we could get everything retagged well, but I'm not sure, and wondering how you see that.

@Jefromi The tag feature will automatically suggest tags for people, so knowing which mechanics have tag names and which do not is a non-issue.

@Rainbolt For tagging new questions, yes, once we put in a lot of work tagging existing ones, mostly (but suggestions aren't 100% and people don't reliably use them). Old questions are really likely to not end up with full coverage though. For searching it kinda works, in that you'll always just try the tag and it may or may not work. So yes, there are things that help, but "non-issue" seems a bit exaggerated.

@Jefromi If the community fails to properly tag questions (both old and new), that is a fault of the community, not of this methodology.

@Jefromi There will be a transition period in which not everything is tagged fully; that's unavoidable since we didn't start this way to begin with. You will know which mechanics are tagged because you'll go "oh, there's no mtg-cycling yet", like on other sites, and if you accidentally create a second tag for the same thing, we'll synonymise it (mtg-landcycling would probably become a synonym).

On tag vs keyword searching: these will often be slightly different. Questions get tagged with those mechanics pivotal to the question. Say a question describes a creature that has first strike and haste, and then asks about the first strike. It will be tagged [mtg-first-strike], and not [mtg-haste]. Searching for haste will be different: keyword search will give you this question that wasn't about haste at all, searching only for [mtg-haste] will exclude it.

And finally: yes, there will be retagging effort involved, of old and new questions. We've been mostly spared this because we only have one MTG tag to worry about most of the time, but we reap the consequences of no organisation. If we apply retagging effort, we reap the rewards of doing that: organisation. Some questions will get missed, and that's a natural consequence of tagging at all: if we find them, we should tag them, and you'll probably find them when you go "wait a minute, I know that question's here somewhere..." and go use keyword search.

@doppelgreener My concern, roughly, is that the transition period will last forever - there will always be old questions with missing tags, and being unsure which terms are worth tagging will only compound that. Like I said, maybe it will actually work, but it sounds like it'll take a lot of effort and planning, and is not something we can accomplish simply by starting to add tags as we come across things. And given the number of questions and the number of motivated editors, it could turn out to be a pretty big task.

@Jefromi That's a valid concern. If we might never realistically achieve this given our current stance, I agree that may be a problem. Like you I'm not sure if it will work out or not. I at least count among those motivated editors: I do so much editing on RPGSE, and have already done 2-3 retag exercises in the order of hundreds of questions. My chief concern is just how we'd space it out so as to not push all content off the front page all the time. (RPGSE went through a big edit explosion recently, and new questions still got answered, but this is a different site and community.)

Plus, there may be other higher-level tagging schemes that would be more helpful than tagging by mechanics. RPGSE has [spells] for every spell, not one tag per spell nor type of spell nor school of spell, but it's at least one distinct category that's useful to tag by. If we have something viable like that for MTG, that may be preferable.

@doppelgreener I guess then it would be helpful to discuss, maybe in another question, what the best tagging scheme is at can find, so that we can judge the idea based on a real notion of how things would look, and how hard it'd be to accomplish.

@Jefromi I think that is a fantastic idea.


text:
How to handle tagging for Pandemic Legacy season 2?
In a few weeks, Pandemic Legacy Season 2 will be released. Based on the previews, it is pretty much an entirely different game from either Pandemic or Pandemic Legacy season 1. This is quite different from season 1, which was basically normal Pandemic with some additional mechanics.
Presumably we want a new tag for season 2. But what should it be? And should we alter the existing Pandemic Legacy tag to make it clear that those questions are about season 1?

Done. May take a few minutes for caches to update. All 20 questions are now pandemic-legacy-season-1.

Assuming the two do end up being very clearly different, I would favor pandemic-legacy-season-1 and pandemic-legacy-season-2. Might as well use the full names given by the publisher, and if we tried to keep pandemic-legacy for season 1, but add pandemic-legacy-season-2, it'd just be confusing.
If people agree (I won't do this unilaterally) then I can go rename the existing tag before season 2 comes out, while it's easier because pandemic-legacy questions are all about season 1, not a mix of the two.

This would be my preference.

@bwarner Cool, I'll let it sit a couple days (looks like it doesn't release until the 26th so should be safe) just in case anyone has better colors to paint this bikeshed, and take care of it, say, Saturday if nothing came up. Feel free to ping me if it looks like I forgot.

@Jefromi This is your ping in case you forgot.

@diego I forgoooooot thank you!

I believe that the pandemic-legacy tag should be modified to pandemic-legacy-s01 or pandemic-legacy-season1 and the creation of a pandemic-legacy-s02 or pandemic-legacy-season2. For example if the same question (let's say about a standard game mechanic) would have two separate answers depending on whether it is Season 1 or 2 then a new tag would be warranted. If the question would apply to both S01 and S02, than it should just be outlined in the body of the question and both tags can be used.
If the tag edit is going to be made, it should be done so sooner rather than later though. As of right now it looks like all the pandemic-legacy questions are about season 1, so a tag edit now would be a lot simpler than one after season 2 questions start appearing.
Update Spoilers for S02:

After looking around a bit more, the games seem pretty different from each other. The rules may be similar and there will be some carry over, but the gameboards are completely different. I think they should be treated as two separate games

I think it will be less that questions would have different answers, and more that a question for one would be meaningless for the other. Things like roadblocks, relationships, and search parties might not exist at all. The roles are different. Even basic concepts like cures and outbreaks don't exist (at least with those names). Of course, the legacy aspect of it makes this somewhat speculation.

If the questions will only be relevant about one season and meaningless to the other than there isn't really a reason to create a new tag. The umbrella [tag:pandemic-legacy] will cover both with no confusion since it will apply only to one and not the other vs. slightly differently depending on season. Any edge cases can just be specified in the question body/title.

@Malco That makes sense on the surface, but "no confusion" might be an exaggeration. If these are effectively two different games, then using one tag for both is a bit like using the same tag for regular Pandemic and for Pandemic Legacy, or for Small World and Small World Underground. We usually have different tags for different games, so it's a little confusing to not do so here.

SPOILERS FOR S02 @Jefromi After looking around a bit more, the games seem pretty different from each other, rules may be similar and there will be some carry over, but the gameboards are completely different. I think they should be treated as two separate games.

That's not a spoiler. They are two distinct games!


text:
Are questions about homebrew card creations allowed?
Would questions in this format be allowed?

What's you favorite dominion kingdom card that you thought up yourself?
What interesting new Citadels characters have you added?
What roles have you made up for Pandemic that aren't in the base game or expansions?

All of them would be a one-suggestions per answer deal.
Questions about house-rules or suggestions to solve a specific problem are usually allowed, but I'm afraid that these will get cracked down on for being in a poll/list format.
If they are not allowed, could they be rephrased like this to be more 'objective'?

What's you favorite home-brew dominion card to add more inter-player interaction?
What interesting new Citadels characters have you added to make the offensive cards a little less devastating?
What effect will adding this home-brew card to pandemic have?

I ask because I think there could be an interesting question, but I'm not sure if the rules currently allow it. If they don't, could someone please explain how disallowing questions like this improves the site?

Having seen two examples now,

https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/2519/custom-citadels-characters-the-usurper
https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/2459/custom-citadels-characters-the-gambler

I have a couple concerns

Both creations have been edited based upon the first answer received.

That appears to be "forum-like" behavior.  While editing questions to improve them is cool, changing the meaning of them invalidates previous answers
Doesn't scale well, I envision a succession of edits that interest fewer and fewer people continually being bumped to the front page, ie "How does this card look NOW?"  If a discussion like that is going to occur, it should be done through comments, if at all.

With the quick edits, I surmise there has been no play testing on your part.

My preference would be that this site not become the initial feedback mechanism for any proposed house rule/change to all games.
I think limiting ourselves to discussions about cards/items that have undergone initial playtesting would lead to more interesting questions.

"This card seems to work well for our group.  Is there something we are overlooking?"
"The concept for this card really resonates with my group but in this one situation it seems broken/weak.  Can you suggest a fix?"

I posted simultaneously to this, but this answer (especially the second half) says what I wanted to say... just more clearly!  I'd like the homebrew questions to be asking for a fix to a specific problem, rather than for general impressions.  And I'd really like the posts not to be continually edited under my feet.  I've been having to edit my answers to compensate and it is both tiring and confusing!

could you delete those questions then? It seems like this is not where they belong.

@crazy - I could, but I am continually reminded that I ought not to take action that the community can handle.  In this case, I posted to meta because I thought the conversation would be valuable.  2 upvotes here and 0 close votes on your question indicate that the community hasn't rendered a negative decision to your questions.

I would strongly prefer the latter set of questions over the former, because (as you suggest) the latter are more objective and the former sound a bit too much like GTKY questions. I would consider the more targeted questions to be acceptable.

I'm currently finding your Citadels homebrews to be a little fatiguing; in the sense that you ask "what effects would this card have on the game, and would you play with it", which requires an extensive, well-thought-out answer - you can't answer with a one-liner!  Having said that I like considering the implications of homebrews and house rules, and I'm a bit sad that someone is downvoting these questions (perhaps because they don't think much of your card ideas?)
I think to be more valuable, your homebrew card questions could start with "this feature of [game X] could be improved. Would [my card] improve things in this respect, or else what would you suggest that would help the situation?"  To be honest I'm not seeing how your Gambler and Usurper cards make Citadels better - they both seem to want to add a big whack of randomness to a game that thrives on the fact that you can (or hope you can) predict what's going to happen. But I guess if you're jaded enough with Citadels, the mere novelty of new cards might re-enliven your games!

Could we make this a little less specific to me? I don't mind the feedback, but don't think people want to come to this question and have it be all about my 2 questions. :P

In the future I'll take them somewhere else more appropriate and stop annoying you guys. :)

@Crazy: Sorry, didn't mean to pick on you - it's just hard to talk generically about homebrew questions when the only ones (I've seen) on the site are your two!  As I hope I implied, I actually liked them. I guess it would just be good to hash out what makes an excellent homebrew question as opposed to an average one. Your pioneering work is invaluable in working out the answer to that!

@Crazy: Actually, I tell a lie, I posted a homebrew Ticket to Ride rule at some point, didn't I?  And no one apart from you was really interested in that one either.  I guess it's just us who are into that kind of thing on this site (For now)!

@crazy:  I'm not nearly as keen as @thesun as far as liking to discuss homebrew stuff, but I am grateful that you are willing to ask those questions.  During the beta it is very important that we properly define the site.  I think it is impossible to do that without also defining what doesn't belong.  I'm not yet willing to say that these questions don't belong.  Wishing more folks would weigh in here.

The first set of questions is rather .. imaginary.
https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask

we are being asked an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”

The concepts are more interesting, so long as the concepts are based on the actual game as it exists in reality.


text:
When are "sub-tags" appropriate?
Stackoverflow uses a lot of "sub-tags" as I call them, for example c#-4.0 that help add value to the question by letting you search for specific information that wouldn't really work as a combination of tags (does anyone really want a 4.0 tag?!?!). These are basically tags that are a more specific version of a general tag.
Things are similar on this site. For example, dominion-openings probably shouldn't exist as there is already a dominion and openings tag, and this would merely be the intersection of the two, as would be c#-polymorphism on Stackoverflow. (sorry for the Stackoverflow example for those who don't frequent there as well, but it helps to illustrate the situation).
But what about tags that apply to specific aspects of specific games? I just retagged several questions to mtg-manabase as it would likely be difficult to find these questions without a tag and a manabase tag would apply only to magic anyway.  We have already chosen to use "sub-tags" for expansions, like dominion-seaside. What sub-tags should we encourage/discourage? Would chess-sacrifices, stratego-placement, go-defence, or bridge-bidding be allowed, or should these be organized in some other way (I tried to find some edge-cases)?

Would anyone who wasn't a semi-hardcore player even know to search "manabase", though? Searching for "Magic land" seems to find most of them pretty easily.

@Alex Then why have the [tag:magic-the-gathering] tag? You can just search for "Magic" and find all of those questions even more easily, with a higher relevancy rate too. :D

So the questions show up in a cute blue highlight color when I look at the front page, of course. :)

I don't really see the point of a tag like bridge-bidding, and can see some disadvantages. As you point out, you can just search for the intersection, by typing either informally
bridge bidding

or formally (to force the search by tags)
[bridge] [bidding]

into the search box.
There are a few other issues:

There's a distinction between top-level tags, and the rest. A tag like magic-the-gathering is "top-level". It's the kind of tag people will want to follow. In fact, if you're a hardcore Magic player, you can follow that tag, use that as your homepage, and just never see the rest of the site at all! A tag like bidding isn't going to be used like that. In your SO example, I think that's a key difference between c#-4.0 and the non-existent c#-polymorphism - the former is top-level, the latter is not.
Tags should be as simple as possible. Tag conventions are great, but most users don't know or care about what they "should" be using. Most people would just tag bridge bidding and move on. Any policy that doesn't do what people expect needs to be considered carefully.
Special conventions need maintenance. The corollary to the previous point is that higher rep users will have to do more monitoring and retagging when non-obvious conventions are in use.
Determining game-specific tags is non-trivial. How do you make the distinction between a tag that only applies to a single game, and one which is more general? It's impossible to guarantee that no other game has the concept of "manabase". Even worse, they might have a similar mechanic, but call it something a bit different. Choosing where to draw that line with specialised tag naming is going to be endless.

One place where this might be a little different is the case of game expansions, and how they should be tagged. I'll bring that up in a separate question.
The best summary we have of how tagging is intended to work is Why do we tag questions?. It doesn't address your question directly, but is still somewhat helpful.
I've done a bit of further reading. Here are two takes from gaming, both for and against "sub-tags".

In favour (full disclosure - I was involved in this one): Game-specific tags
Against (Jeff thinks a single tag per game is almost always enough): A personal appeal to Jeff Atwood: Recent changes to Gaming

So you're saying we should drop the dash and just use bidding, defense, manabase, sacrifice, etc.? I assumed those tags wouldn't be allowed as they apply to so many different games and mean very different things in each of them, kind of like a 4.0 tag would. I suppose they would function along the same lines as the rules and strategy tags,  and if they became widely sanctioned they would be a good solution.

@CrazyJugglerDrummer, ire may not be saying that ... and in fact I think your assumption is accurate, even if that is not currently how things work here. See this answer to an earlier question on tagging: as you both point out, tags other than game and genre tags can mean different things in different games and thus cause more confusion than they may be worth. It may also be worth noting that SO is not a particularly good example for tagging: there are plenty of questions that have five tags and probably need only one or two at most.


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Are our moderators being too aggressive?
A handful of questions have been mod-closed recently without any votes from the community.  While I don't disagree with the questions being closed, I wonder if the rest of us should be getting an opportunity to weigh in.  As of today (1/2/2011), we have over 30 regular users with the vote-to-close ability.  Would it be better if we got a chance to use it?
BTW, this is not intended as a slight against the work our moderators have done so far.  I've been a moderator on a non-SE web forum and unilateral thread closure was a big sticking point between the mods and the regulars.  It just fosters an "us vs. them" mentality that's hard to break.

I don't feel I should be chiming in here, but I did want to point out that I hang out in the chat room pretty much all the time.  If anyone wants to stop in and talk to me directly, that'd be cool.  Also, @LittleBobbyTables frequents chat as well.

No offense taken.  "Would it be better if we got a chance to use it?"  Up until this past month, almost every question was closed by a total of 5 votes, not just a single mod.  Maybe users were all on vacation in December, maybe users were fine with all the questions being asked, or maybe we are being aggressive.  I'm curious to see what others think.

@Pat: I know this isn't exactly what you meant, but I want to say it anyway: Your moderating should not be dependent on people seeking you out and talking to you. If the moderator takes action first, and then waits for the community provide input on said action, you're doing it wrong.

@jalf - sorry you misunderstood.  I merely pointed out chat as a means for folks to interact with me directly if they wished.  I find commenting back and forth an inefficient means of one on one communication.

@Pat: I didn't misunderstand. Read the first part of my comment. :) I just wanted to emphasize that such communication typically shouldn't be necessary at all. If it is, it might be because the moderator in question is taking it upon himself to do too much.

I do feel mods are being too aggressive.
Questions that mods feel are mildly off-topic seem to receive a stricter treatment.
For example, surveys about variants seem to get closed frequently, as do questions about anything "meta" about board games (e.g. advice on arranging tournaments).
If we want boardgames.stackexchange to evolve into something more than just rules questions, game recommendations, and strategy suggestions, we need to be more open about what gets asked.
Incidentally, I want to thank all the mods for getting boardgames.stackexchange.com going in the first place --- you probably had to cull a lot of garbage for a long time --- but I think it's time to be a little more open and see where that leads us.

+1.  I don't even think the community will end up disagreeing with the mods in a lot of cases.  I'd just like a borderline question to stay open for more than 5 minutes so the rest of us can weigh in on it.

I for one almost have left this community due to too agressive mods.

The only way this will ever stand a chance to get have a user-base of NON-stackexchange people is if it loosens up a little bit. IMHO
On other sites, a moderate amount of strictness is fine. Programming languages, game development, math, and many other subjects are inherently non-subjective. Its pretty easy to see what topics are useful, and what topics aren't.
Games on the other hand are supposed to be fun!!! What's fun is going to be subjective a lot of the time. This site is different from the other sites in that its objective is fun instead of knowledge. If you guys disagree and say that knowledge of games is more important than fun, IMHO you're missing the point of games! :D
If this site wants to be able to compete with other sites, its going to need to change its goals a little. Would you rather go to a slightly less well designed site based on board game fun like BGG, or an SE site based on knowledge with strict limitations on the types of questions allowed? This site is very unfriendly to new users and frankly I wouldn't recommend it to any of them yet.

I totally agree that the mods are closing too many questions (no personally offense to them whatsoever, I greatly appreciate the time and effort they've put into their jobs :).
Take a look at these questions that the community upvoted several time, but one mod closed:
What Risk variants do you like? 15 upvotes, 7 favorites.
what games use the worker placement mechanic? and economic games for mature players? 10 upvotes each and one mod closed them.
5 other highly voted but closed questions
Please open your ears and listen to the community before closing stuff!!!! There are more to board games than rules!!!! :D :D

Put it this way. People come to Stackoverflow because they want to get answers to objective programming questions. Programming is a huge profession that you can make a living with, and many people do. People go there to learn from others and solve problems.
This site is about games. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the vast majority of people play games and go to board gaming sites for fun. If what you want from a programming site is strict restrictions to objective only questions, that's fine, and this site could fill that role perfectly. However, IMHO some people want to have fun and ask questions about recommendations and other subjective topics that SO would deem less than perfect. If this site feels like turning them away, we will only be left with questions about rules and strategies. If that's all this site wants to be, that's fine. However, I believe very few people have a reason to specifically talk about strategy and rules and NOT anything subjective/fun, so this site would be left with a very small user-base.
Closing fun questions just makes the site unnecessarily strict. They are closed on SO because they are not very useful as programming is about skillfully communicating with computers. Board Games are about fun, and restricting well written, on-topic, useful fun questions is only going to hurt us when the whole site revolves around a source of fun anyway.
What I think we need to do is make the site a little more friendly. I doubt most of you had the first 3 questions asked on a stackexchange site closed with almost no explanation. I did, and it doesn't feel good. If this stupid site doesn't want my questions, I'll leave. And I almost did. Fortunately, I stayed and came to love it. The more we can make new user's experiences nicer, the more users we'll have and the more awesome the site will be. When users have a nice first experience, they tend to stay. Light-handed moderators are a huge part of this. :)

Upvoted for emphasis on the word "fun".  I feel as though the moderators are closing things based on their own (somewhat subjective!) literalistic interpretations of the site rules, rather than on the fact that useful, interesting, well-researched answers are not generated, or are not likely to be generated, by a given question.  Lighten up a bit and give questions a chance to prove or condemn themselves, before dropping the hammer!

I don't think an emphasis on fun is the right emphasis for this site. Fun is great but this site is about answering questions aout games. The criteria for good or bad questions should be whether they are relevant to games not whether they are fun.

I agree with @MrHen, while games are for fun, this is a Q&A site, not a forum.

I don't spend a lot of time on this site, but so far, my impression is that yes, one or more mods are much too trigger-happy.
One of the nice things about StackExchange in general is that it is very nearly self-governing. Off-topic questions get closed by the community anyway, in an open and transparent manner.
There is very rarely a need for a moderator to close a question, unless it is blatant spam.
One of the key things that made StackOverflow, and now all the other SE sites, work is that they shape themselves. Rules aren't so much laid down from Above, they often emerge through users commenting on questions, voting to close, voting to reopen, upvoting and downvoting.
Or to put it another way: I've been active on StackOverflow since a month or two after the site launched. I don't think I've ever seen a question that was closed by a moderator. Deleted, yes, or locked, sure, those have happened a few times, but simply closed? I can't recall ever seeing it. Because it's unnecessary, and it might spark too much friction.
Here, though? It seems like 5+ of the questions on the front page alone have been through that wringer. That is insane.
The community is perfectly capable of closing questions. Let it do its thing.
Modrators should enforce the community's policy, in the rare cases when the community is unable to do so by itself. They should not try to define the policy themselves.
(and yes, this is a major difference from how moderators are typically expected to act on "traditional" forums, where they are the only channel through which a thread can be closed)

I do think the moderators are being too aggressive on some occasions, I strongly agree with @kristo's point: "I'd just like a borderline question to stay open for more than 5 minutes so the rest of us can weigh in on it."
For example IMHO, @Pat Ludwig, there was no need to close this question (discussed here) so quickly (within an hour, on New Years Eve!), before giving @CrazyJugglerDrummer a decent length of time to improve it.

There's nothing stopping @CrazyJugglerDrummer improving a question and trying to get it reopened.

@charles boyung: That's in THEORY. In practice, closed questions rARELY get reopened, even if they've been fixed.

@Tom - show me an example of a fixed question that hasn't been reopened. If you think there are cases of this, you can flag it for the moderator and tell them it's been fixed and deserves to be reopened. They may not always see that the questions have been improved.

While "aggressive" is not the word I would have used, I feel uneasy sometimes on this site, as I've never been on other SE sites.
The reason is not them closing OT threads, thought: I think that is fine and correct.
Too often I've seen them comment questions or answers saying "you should do this or that instead". I find that annoying, "uneasing", and pointless. I think that a moderator can choose what has to be closed, but can't choose how something has to be done. With "can't" I mean can't, as in "he is really not able to do it: if he will try, he will fail".
I.e. if the posts are a river you can divert its course, but you can't turn the water into something else.

I imagine many of the people here have been StackOverflow users for a long time.  They way they do things has bled into the overall StackExchange network, for better or worse.  I think the mods are simply trying to educate everyone on how the system as a whole works.

Yes, and I feel their way of "educating" to be... too much.

Yes, the moderators are being too aggressive.

Can you elaborate on why?  This is a discussion after all. ;-)

Shoudn't this question be closed as being too subjective?

that's why it's on meta - because it's about the site itself.  Meta questions don't necessarily need an objective answer.

I know at least some of the moderators have been inconsistent in their application of power.
If you're going to close subjective questions as being unanswerable, then they all need to be closed. If you're going to leave some/many open, then you can't pick on others to close that still match the previously-approved "pattern" for OK Subjective.
This question is a prime example, imho

I have not been here long enough to comment on this question. Nevertheless, I have seen instances where I thought questions were closed before being adequately assessed.
While our site is decidedly Q&A, we must remember the theme that brought us here together: We are all passionate gamers, and we enjoy trying, learning, and sharing games.
Questions can be good and subjective. This is one instance where I felt the question should have remained open:
The idea that a question can be re-asked if worded differently begs the question: Why not edit the question and keep it open?
There is, in my opinion, a lot of value in that question and the answers it provided--even if it's subjective. Subjective also need not be argumentative. Our opinions on games are subjective. Should we not provide them? Should we remove "subjective answers" when users write why they like or dislike a game, a rule, or an expansion? Those are inherently subjective things.
As such there is enough intrinsic, useful value in such questions, even if the scope of their answers is too narrow to our liking.
There's my two cents!

A question can be edited and then reopened.  For me, the purpose of closing a question is more to prevent people spending time on answering a question that needs substantial revision, (or isn't appropriate altogether).


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New Tag for Thornwatch?
Can we get a tag for the Thornwatch boardgame?
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/159011/thornwatch
Thornwatch - How does paying for Hero Actions work?

Added the tag.  Tags will get fixed pretty quickly around here.  If needed, you can always flag the question.

Figured it would, is there an "untaggable game" tag? And how much rep do you need to add tags again? On the app so can't view the Faq...

@deworde 150 on this site

Huh, weird, maybe because I'm using the app, but I typed Thornwatch in a bunch of times while trying to submit the question and it didn't take.

@deworde SE apps restrict the selection to existing tags only, though there's a bug to create new tags on Android app

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


text:
When is it appropriate to submit multiple answers to the same question?
Many times I have several ideas to answer a question. For instance, in response to, "How do I mitigate tendency X in game Y?", I might have a few strategy ideas, as well as a couple of expansions I think make this less of an issue, or possibly even house rules to help. Some of these ideas are better than others. Should I just pile this all into one big answer, or split it out into several? I prefer to split up my answers, so that each answer can be voted up or down on its own merits, but I've had several people ask me to just condense everything into one answer. What's the right thing to do?

This is a question and answer site, not a forum.
The fact that you have to click through a warning dialog box is a strong message that multiple answers from one person are not encouraged here.  If you think you need multiple answers for one question, then the question is probably not the best OR you need to condense your answers into one.
No matter how many answers a question gets, we all know that most folks are only going to read a couple of them.  I don't think it is fair for one answerer to try to attract extra eyeballs by submitting multiple answers.
Let's keep ourselves to voting on complete answers, not items or ideas.  Every answer follow the "back it up" principle.

It contains personal experience
You link to an outside source.

If your answer contains phrases like, "I haven't tried it but ..." or "Many people use ..." or "I've heard that ..." just strike that whole section.  Speculation doesn't belong on a StackExchange site.  There are plenty of forums that would love that sort of discussion.

I certainly haven't been trying to attract extra eyeballs, just doing what made sense to me. If splitting up answers is not helpful to people in the context of SE expectations, I'm happy not to do it.

I think this is unnecessarily absolute. I do definitely agree that it's better if you can write a single comprehensive answer, with all the pieces connected, but if there are two very distinct solutions to a problem ("how should I store game X?") it might be most organized and fair to present them separately.

If you feel that you must split your response into two answers then that's a good sign the question wasn't very well formulated to begin with. As per the FAQ:

All questions on Stack Exchange are expected to be objective and have concrete answers; we’re not a place for conversation, opinions, or socializing. We also expect questions to represent real problems, not just imponderables, hypotheticals, or requests for opinions.

StackExchange sites are built upon the premise of precise, well-formed questions that have a concrete answer. If you feel you have contradictory answers to a question, or answers that would make more sense if they were two separate answers, then the question needs to be made more specific, or perhaps itself split into two questions.
To use your example "How do I mitigate tendency X in game Y?" I can see how this question is so broad that you feel that more than one answer is required. I would first request clarification of the question. Are you looking for house rules? Strategy? Game expansions which deal with this issue?
It might be best to request the question be made more specific, or split into multiple questions: "What house rules could be made to mitigate tendency X in game Y?" "Which expansions help solve tendency X in game Y?" "What game strategy can I employ to mitigate tendency X in game Y?"

The general consensus is: don't.  The stackexchange network likes canonical answers.  Cover the question as good as you can in one question.  You'll get more upvotes that way.