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Should We Edit First-Time Questions To Make Them A Good Fit For The Site?
It's the usual scenario: a newcomer to the site arrives and posts a polite, interesting and constructive question.  Which doesn't have an objective answer.  So the question is closed and the user gets a "Hi! Your question is inappropriate, can you edit it into something more suitable" form response.
I worry that the newcomer's response is likely to be "What the -?"  The "Stack Exchange way" is hard to comprehend when you first arrive.  Everyone, everyone posts a first question that turns out to be unsuitable.  The new arrival has just been asked to edit their question for reasons that they don't really understand into a "better" form that may not be obvious to them at all.
Some people stick with the site and eventually "get it".  Others, I'm sure, just think "how rude" and go off somewhere where they're appreciated.
If a long-time user posts inappropriate questions, they don't deserve any slack, but I think newcomers ought to be treated a bit less brusquely.  Can we reformat their questions into something a bit closer to what we're looking for?  On the one hand, extensive edits may seem a bit rude, but on the other, it can't be as bad as a big "[CLOSED]" and what amounts to an editorial line of "questions like this are not welcome here".
(I'm thinking of the recent closed question on Kids of Catan, if it wasn't already obvious.)

If you have strong reason to believe a moderate edit can turn a new, marginal question into something that's definitely on-topic, I say go for it.
If you'd have to completely re-write the question, probably best to leave it closed.

Closed != Deleted
It's on the path, but the two are different concepts.  Closing a question does the following

Prevents answers
Allows Deletion votes

That's pretty much it!  The following actions are not prohibited:

Editing
Commenting
Voting
Voting to reopen

Anyone is free to edit any closed question.  If a good edit job is done, it will probably gather reopen votes.  This very path occurs quite often on this site.
If you are trying to drum up support for a rule that would state, "A question cannot be closed from a new user, it must be edited" then I cannot support that.  For one, the system doesn't support making that a rule. Secondly, a good editing job is not something that can be created out of thin air.  This solution would devolve into leaving substandard questions open until someone stepped forward to fix it.
Substandard questions, especially of the list/recommendation/poll variety can quickly obtain many short, lousy answers that would no longer be valid once the question is edited.  Then we'd need a policy to edit or delete those.
Closing a question provides a window of opportunity for the poster (or any interested party) to fix the question into a suitable one for this site and the StackExchange network.
I would urge anyone that feels strongly about the new user experience to jump right in and assist in editing their questions.  Let's work together to make this a quality site.  We've been told that lowering the bar to get more questions is not an option, therefore I strongly believe that leaving questions open in the hopes that they will get edited before devolving into a list of 20 one line answers is unworkable.

Thanks, that clarifies matters considerably!  I guess I'm worried that "closed as not constructive" (or whatever) might look a bit critical to the newcomer who doesn't know any better.  I agree that a first time poster could definitely post a terrible question that needs immediate and decisive closing; what we see in practice though tends to be well-meaning but naive questions.  In the case of the question I was asking about, the OP seems to have agreed to edit it himself, but in future I may rush in to salvage similar questions: I'm taking this response as a go-ahead!

@the anytime!  I would agree that "closed" probably doesn't send the right message that properly encompasses that state.  I haven't been able to come up with a better suggestion though.  And yes, please edit away, open or closed.  A good edit can turn a poor question into a good one, or an already popular question into a great one.

I think this reinforces a number of concepts that we want users to understand: closing isn't the end of the road, editing can and will happen, quality is important, and explanations for why things happen should always be available. It's better to keep the quality up and creep toward the end of beta than to lower the bar and go live with a site that isn't going to survive. There are plenty of places to provide subpar content about games; this shouldn't be one of them.

@Dave: Except that users don't understand these things, and don't see that their questions are liable to open the floodgates to "subpar" content.  The Kids of Catan question is a case in point, it was a polite, constructive, thought-through question that in no possible universe would have generated a ton of ridiculous competing answers.  Its unsuitability for the site is quite subtle, and taking a gruff hardline approach is, IMO, just going to drive potential quality users away.

@thesun, that's the challenge of building the site to full strength. There's no way for us to tell which users simply didn't think to read the FAQ and which ones couldn't care less how the community is designed ... and no way to explain to veteran users why their question X was closed and a new user's question X1 was left open. I'm not saying we should close-and-ignore such questions, but rather that they should be closed with an explanation of what's missing and what we're looking for ... as Pat said, "closed" is somewhat abrupt, but that's SE for you.

@the - I disagree somewhat.  Here is an example of somewhat similar question asking about house rules to solve a problem.  The OP fixed the question the next day.  It was too late to prevent a spate of low quality answers.  Anyone supplying an awesome answer to that question now will have to face the prospect of appearing at the bottom of a long page and hoping for upvotes.

Heh, just realized I could at least address the last part of my last comment by liberally sprinkling some downvotes on folks that didn't appear to answer based on personal experience.  That will make it easier for an awesome answer to get traction.

I find the "personal experience" criterion quite mystifying, I have to say - you can have a valid, rigorously-thought-out answer about a game you've never even played, IMO.  But I just went back and looked at those answers and yes, there are too many of them and it's an ugly mess.  I think the question is more to blame than the responders, but sadly it got a good few upvotes :P

@the - you can have a valid, rigorously thought out answer, but answers with no experience are near worthless on average.  Folks will pontificate about most anything given a chance, and that's cool ... on a forum.

@Pat: But as usual, what this is all coming down to is punishing actual valid, rigorously thought out questions and answers because they come in a form that is on average near worthless.  I don't understand why we can't use our intelligence to praise good questions and punish bad ones, instead of praising things that come in an approved shape, and punishing things that fail to fit that shape.  The guidelines turn into the rules, and sometimes that makes me sad.

@the - I disagree that the question is valid and well thought out and that is ultimately why I closed it.  The system allows this.  It also allows you to vote to reopen.  I've been overturned before, it's cool.  We each get to use the tools the site gives everyone to shape it.

@Pat: Agreed!  Sorry to have prolonged this in-comments debate, I guess I must just be in a debate-y mood today :D

@the - no, this has been valuable!  I hope I have time after digesting this a bit further to edit some of this into my answer to make it more better.

I suggest that questions from "new" users (basically anyone with less than 50-100 reputation) be put into a "review" category, for review by senior members of the site.
This could function much like a temporary "close" (that prevents answers) without calling it that. There would be a message that says "Welcome to the site. We review all questions from new users for suitability." There is, in fact, such a process for edits by people with low "rep."
One of three things could happen. 1) A moderator could deem the question "suitable" and quickly take it out of review. Then the message would be, "This question is suitable for the site, keep up the good work."
2) The question could be put in queue to be "fixed" by reviewers, after which a message is  sent, "In its original form, the question was unsuitable because it was off topic/subjective/too localized or whatever. It has been modified and is now suitable for the site."
3) The question goes from "under review" to "closed." The message would be: The question was unsuitable for the site because..., and our reviewers were unable to sufficiently improve it."

It seems to me that your suggestion would simply add complexity to the existing process without addressing what I think is the OP's concern, which is that low-quality content from new users is closed with a standard comment.

@Dave: I'm saying, let's "freeze" postings by newbies until they're reviewed (we do this now with EDITS). Then a moderator could 1) "release" it with little or no editing. 2) put it "up" for editing by us or 3) close it if we can't fix it. Let's fix what we can fix, and close what we can't. In battlefield terminology, it's called "triage."


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Closing as not constructive?
Perhaps this is just educating the new guy (who just got access to the moderator tools), but this questions was recently given a vote to close as not constructive:
What caused this world-class player' to respond inappropriately to her partner's transfer bids?
I don't understand the arguments FOR closing.
This question fascinates me as I think examples like this can be really good tools for understanding high-level bridge play.  I earnestly want to know how that could happen.
I don't see this as too different from any other question asking about strategy.

I think it's a good question, and I've not seen a great answer to it yet.  I'm not a bridge expert, but I'm sure there has to be a good reason for why the bidding took that route.

What was going on through the players mind, is a question only the player can answer.
Apart from giving opinions, no one here can really answer that question in a constructive way.
Given the embarrassing situation, I suppose an answer from the player involved would not be forthcoming soon, and even if it did, you will likely be disappointed with your expectations of gaining insight into high-level play.
Frankly, I am surprised that any experienced bridge player would be fascinated by this, with expectations of gaining insight into high-level play, even after reading the article by Zia Mahmood which does not even attempt to justify the bidding.
Note: this is not one of those situations where experts have a difference of opinion. This was just someone turning their brain off. If it was truly a subtle/discussion worthy situation, Zia's article would be something completely different.
btw, you can find some info here: http://www.worldbridge.org/tourn/Veldhoven.11/Microsite/Bulletins/Veldhoven.2011.Bulletin.%5B6%5D.pdf, which does imply that it was an embarrassing moment for the player involved (See page 15, the numbers game).
If you are interested in the opening 1NT bid, there might be a question there.
Also, I would like to point out that a question being closed does not mean it is the end for it. It can be edited, and reopened.
And your "new guy" made me laugh (sorry!).

I wasn't taking it as a literal "What was this guy thinking" but taking the implied means of the phrase "what was he thinking" to mean what were the possible game situations that could have lead here.  Are you saying that we're not allowed to use idioms in questions?

@NealTibrewala: I suggest we let the author of question decide what the question was. Until then, I suggest we go by the title, and the questions that were actually asked.

Also, are you implying by "Frankly, I am surprised that any experienced bridge player would be fascinated by this" that a question can be closed because it doesn't apply to experienced players?  I would expect the bar to be low enough to at least interest beginners, perhaps even low enough for dabblers.

@NealTibrewala: No, I am just stating my surprise at this meta question being opened. Apologies if that offends you, that was not the intent. And yes, there really is nothing even for beginners there, apart from perhaps, "see what happens if you shut off your brain".

@Aryabhata: if that's your answer - "there is no possible explanation for this hand, apart from a temporary brain malfunction", then maybe you should have given it as an answer.  Voting to close because YOU think the question is stupid, when others have upvoted it and - obviously interested in the question - tried to provide answers to it, is just arrogant.  And Neal is obviously right about the idiom in the question.  Of COURSE I'm not literally asking someone to phone up the player and find out precisely what they were thinking (maybe about whether they'd left the bathwater running).

@thesunneversets: Let me ask you this: Did your question really get answered? I don't see any arrogance in casting a vote to close a question which I think is un-constructive (according to the rules of the site). What else do you expect me to do? If your question was something else, please at least have that somewhere! Note: your question has not been closed yet (requires at least 5 total votes), and if it did, you could always edit it and flag it for reopening.

@thesunneversets: btw, I don't think the question is stupid. Just that, for the stackexchange format, it is not a constructive question. And as to your comment about answers already being there, I have seen questions with more than 30 answers being closed on stackoverflow. There is no arrogance there. Only somebody's (subjective, of course) opinion of what is a valid question for the stackexchange format.

@Aryabhata - sorry, I didn't mean to suggest you were being irresponsible by casting a vote to close, it's your right.  I do think there needs to be more discussion about questions about analysing a particular game state or initial position (in Magic as well as Bridge).  I feel a meta question of my own brewing...

I think there are, broadly, two ways to interpreting what is required to "close as not constructive".
There's the conservative way, that takes a very hard line.  There's a liberal way, which wants to give questions the benefit of the doubt.  Unfortunately, it takes only 5 exponents of the conservative school to be active to close all "borderline" questions.  (I wish there was a "don't close" vote that could counteract a "close" one.)
Closing as not constructive requires the opinion that answers will not be able to be based on "facts, references, or specific expertise".  Well, on the Bridge question in hand, there are definitely facts and references you can bring to bear, about bidding systems, transfers, the forcing nature of requests to transfer or otherwise.  Specific expertise is bound to be useful: a great Bridge player could have a lot to say about such a hand, how they might have bid it, what went wrong at the table in question.
Yes, this question doesn't definitely have a right answer.  But an awful lot of questions on BG:SE don't have a definite right answer.  If we want our site to have just simple fact-checking requests like "how many points do you need to make a pre-empt bid in Standard American" or "what happens when you block a creature with Trample" then that's fine, if unexciting.  But it should be made rather more clear than it is that questions without simple, objective correct answers are unwelcome.

I agree that the close/reopen system is assymetrical, but at least it exists, so reopening is a (distant) possibility. Your idea is a popular one, btw, but was completely vetoed by the powers that be.

Surely there are standards that have been figured out on other stackexchange sites?  I'm unclear as to the process of the site, in general, is each site supposed to make this decision on its own?  Or are there global guidelines than can be read?

@Neal Tibrewala - There are global guidelines, but in the end the choice is based on some level of subjective interpretation, and there are always disagreements. The notion of subjectivity on these sites has changed over time, quite dramatically. See for example http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/107073/is-the-not-constructive-close-reason-appropriate-for-meta/107082#107082. In general, meta.stackoverflow.com is an excellent place to discuss these broader questions, or to ask e.g. your guidelines question.

I voted to close the question because I see it as "I'd like to discuss this bidding." It's certainly an interesting situation, but to me, a SE question needs to pose something more specific.
There is, I suppose, also a danger that this could lead to a series of questions on specific hands that might, in some way, all be related (although one would hope they would come from a level of play below world championship level). Based on this concern about poker questions, I wonder if perhaps a better approach would be to ask "How can I get my partner to bid a suit I desperately want?" or perhaps "What should I do when my partner seems to want a suit I absolutely do not want to bid?", playing the part of North or South as appropriate. That might lead to more specific answers that would be useful in multiple situations.
This may also be related to our previous discussion about scope and chess questions, which didn't really draw a lot of interest. It would be nice to get more input from the community about all of these questions: there are times I feel that only a handful of us are discussing these issues, and that's not a good thing. (It may be because people don't feel qualified to discuss questions on chess or bridge or poker, but if that's the case, then we need to attract significantly more people to the main site and to meta, or else we will have problems moving forward.)

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Is Asking Every Relevant Question One Can Think Of About A Game To Be Encouraged?
I'm sort of enjoying, e.g., Tom Au's recent spate of questions about Bridge: but I'm definitely starting to get the impression that he's just throwing out every possible question about the theory and practice of the game he can think of.  Which is good for one's long-term reputation, I suppose: if you can cover most of the bases of a major game like Bridge, then a lot of questions in the future will have to be closed as duplicates, and the sweet, sweet reputation will all fall to you!
I have no idea if there's anything here to be offended by, though.  Is asking questions that I don't urgently need to know the answer to, just because they're there, a desirable practice?  It certainly keeps the site lively, which is better than the tumbleweeds that were blowing through this place a month or two back...

+1 for the imagery of tumbleweeds, and because I had the very similar thoughts on the rash of A&A questions. I can't say it's stopped me from answering a bunch though.

I'm asking questions at a great rate because I will have little time here past my vacation. I want to learn as much bridge and (Allies and Axis) as possible in a limited period of time. Which means "asking every possible question he can think of." Because I do want answers, and I want them NOW.

@Tom: That's definitely fair enough.  As I say I think you've given the site a bit of a shot in the arm, it's much more lively now!  It's just this is a sufficiently "new" way for the site to operate that I thought it was worth asking if it was a good thing.  On balance I reckon it probably is.

This is covered directly in our FAQ.

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

If you feel that the questions are not valid per the FAQ, please vote to close.  Borderline cases can be commented on with an intent to improve and tighten the question.
My opinion is that a lot of them could be good tight questions, but need work.  However, I am no expert in Bridge (novice) or Axis & Allies(never played) so I haven't been confident enough to judge the questions by myself.

I will take a more active and critical look at the quality of the A&A questions. Perhaps @Scott Mitchell would be willing to do so as well, as he seems very knowledgeable about A&A. A few of them have been a shotgunny, and perhaps on their face it's not likely all of these issues have been coming up in actual games. However, many of the issues raise are questions I've asked myself when trying to brainstorm alternative strategies and thus seem like legitimate strategical questions.

I agree -- the bridge and A&A questions all seem to be a bit chatty and open-ended, but I rather let the experts voice their opinion.

I sort of worry that people stumbling on this site will just see 200 questions about Bridge and Axis & Allies and think "huh, not for me really".  But I guess you can't enforce what questions people ask!  And we are getting some good answers and discussions... I kind of hope some fans of different games will feel liking chiming in at some point, though!

@the That is a good point.  Perhaps this is a good time for the long time members to revisit older questions and improve them or their answers.  It would help to show more variety.  this goes double for folks like me who don't play either of those two games :-)

Wow, I just checked and Tom has asked almost 150% the number of questions in 2 weeks of being here than I have in seven months.  Maybe I'm just jealous of him being so prolific!

I believe that most of my questions are either "tight" (or more important), have the makings of "tight" ones. I have benefited in a number of individual cases from suggestions, or even comments that the question can be tightened.

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Unmerge these two questions or fix the question
I'd like to know why my answer to this question was deleted?
It helps if a comment is left when an answer is deleted to at least give me a chance to edit my answer if it is incorrect.
Also the answer was upvoted so it was helpful to a certain number of people and it is a perfectly valid answer to my original question which was merged with this question.
IMO the two questions probably should not have been merged although there was some overlap because my question was about online games and the other about resources for playing games with multiple players over the internet. Which I guess is why you decided my answer was irrelevant because the question has not been reworded to cover both questions in sufficient detail. The two questions have essentially been jammed together.
Deleting all the answers that were valid to my original question is poor form. Either the question should be reworded to support both lots of answers or they should be unmerged if they don't cover the same ground.

Pat L. added a comment to the answer here which I think addresses your question. Basically, for Community Wiki questions, it's considered a good idea to merge several answers into one. This is what happened.

From the answer I gave directly on your answer.

Community Wiki questions in particular benefit from a different structure than regular questions. No further rep will be earned. Consolidating answers will give the community a better resource. When I added this answer to the highest upvoted one, I deleted it as I felt it had no additional value on its own.

I felt that I had left several breadcrumbs so that folks would know why I deleted a bunch of answers to that question.  My apologies, I had no intentions of angering you.
As to the merge (which I did not do myself), it appears quite valid.  Your question had a couple small additional points which would be awesome to add to the CW question.  I encourage you to incorporate them into the question as it stands.

I can see where you're coming from and I can now see that my answer has been consolidated into that top answer. I'd be interested to know why merging answers is the best option for CW? There's no anger, from my point of view I just want an easy readable format to my original question. I just feel the whole thing has been a bit poked and prodded and not entirely convinced that the final result is the best.

@xia - Would you agree that the answer is pretty readable as one main answer?  There isn't a lot of unneeded whitespace and your eye doesn't have to scan over the footers looking for the information needed (the games).  Once voting is taking out of the situation, I don't see the value in having one game per answer.

@xia - And yes, I've definitely poked and prodded it. If you have better ideas on formatting, please bring them up or try they out.  I have a few ideas myself.  The current format is a waypoint to my current perfect "ideal".  Time/energy will determine when I make further progress.  I was also hoping that others would contribute as well.

In the end, I also just want what is best for everyone. Not trying to be argumentative, just would like to know why this format is preferred for CW and not for other questions? You mentioned this is your current perfect ideal, is it also the way other SE sites likes to aggregate CW answers? Why is it better for this format with CW and not with regular questions? What's the difference? If it's not SE standard practice to do this for CW questions maybe I should post another meta question here to debate. Thanks for discussing!

@xia - no problem, I'm always willing to discuss.  Will have to reply more later.  Here are a couple CW questions from StackOverflow which is kind of the "goal" that I'm shooting for.  List of freely available programming books, What should a developer know before building a public web site?.  Erg, can't find the truly awesome CW post I saw that partially inspired me

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Is It Acceptable To Ask For Descriptions of Boardgame Components?
It might be just me, but I felt a twinge of discomfort at the recent Alvin & Dexter related question.  Basically the OP just wants a list of the contents so he can make his own bootleg copy of the expansion.
This might be fine or it might be borderline unethical.  I wasn't sure so I thought I'd ask if anyone else has any strong opinions either way?  I don't want to encourage people not to buy (fairly cheap) expansions for boardgames if at all possible - games designers need to eat too!

I was the OP and can understand this perspective and will happily delete it if the question is one that causes issues on the site.  I can appreciate that it does appear like a way of getting something for nothing.  Equally, in my case, I have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds on boardgames and certainly if an expansion works well I would not only buy it but I am likely to buy it for friends I know who enjoy the game.

@AlexC - I know your question was well-meant reasonable, and I answered it despite my initial misgivings.  Just a bit worried that if there were lots of questions like this on the site, it might start to give people the wrong idea!

We may not know that someone is bootlegging it.  I've very often wanted a component list to first find out if I'm missing anything, and second to proxy whatever it is I may be missing.


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How might I improve my question?
I've asked a question, and I feel that boardgames is the correct place to be asking it (as opposed to ux etc) that is about board game design. At the risk of the meta-effect the question is here https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/20410/which-design-is-clearest-to-indicate-failure-consequence.
I've received 2 downvotes, I'm assuming because my question could be taken as a bit subjective. I'd really like to improve it if the community feel that it is too subjective, so I'm opening this up, to ask what might I be able to do to improve it?
I'd like to keep the question in some form, as I've already had 2 comments that provide really great feedback even if they have not yet proposed an answer, so I'd appreciate any suggestions on what I may be able to do to make it a better fit.

In my opinion, this question would fit better at UX. They have a lot of questions in the general category "what design best communicates idea X to the user?" and in some sense that is their primary area of expertise. On this site, our expertise (or at least mine) tends more towards playing games and understanding the rules and strategies of those games.

@murgatroid99: Want to add this as an answer, and I'll move the question.

In my opinion, this question would fit better at UX. Your question has the form "What design best communicates idea X to the user?" which is a very common question type on UX and is in some sense their primary area of expertise. On this site, our expertise (or at least mine) tends more towards playing games and understanding the rules and strategies of those games.


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Are questions specifically about the computer version of a game on topic?
Our help center says:

Questions about computer implementations of board games are fine.

and our close reasons include:

Questions about computer-based games (except for computer-based versions of board or card games) are off-topic here but can be asked on Arqade.

This seems to include everything to do with the computer version of a board game, whether it applies only to the computer version, or to both the computer version and the physical version. Is that the case? Or do questions specifically about the computer version belong on Arqade? Why?
See for example:

Is older MTG Online client not supported any more?
How to build decks with cards not present in my MTG Online collection

both of which have a few migration votes, and a comment saying they belong on Arqade.

Yes, they're on topic here. The current policy as stated in the help center and close reason does not make an exception, and there's not enough reason to change that policy. So for example:
On-topic:

Rules issues:

Why did Experiment One not get a counter when my Undying creature returned to play? (it was a bug)
In Lords of Waterdeep on iOS, why does placing a corruption token on The Palace of Waterdeep indicate you won't get to take the Ambassador? (it was a bug)
"The rules for X seem to be different from the physical version; how does it work?"

Core gameplay (how to play the actual game):

How to build decks with cards not present in my MTG Online collection
"How do I move my units with the keyboard?"

Meta-gameplay (how to play, outside the actual game)

How to play multiplayer Ticket to Ride (iOS/ipad) with friends over the internet?
How can I "censor" players on the IGS server?
"Where do I enter the password to join a private multiplayer game?"

Meta-game (about the game, outside of actually playing):

Is older MTG Online client not supported any more?
Scrabble computer version that uses the new dictionary? (OSPD4/OTCWL2)
"Does the UI scale well to both tablets and phones?"

Off-topic exceptions, possibly better on SuperUser or Arqade:

Computer issues:

"how do I make X run on windows 95?"
"how do I make online multiplayer work with my router?"

Totally-meta issues (just as off-topic as with physical games):

"what font does the game use?"
"can I get a refund for X?"

First of all, we will generally be able to provide good answers. Even if the questions are specific to the computer game, we are likely to have users who play it. In fact, we may even be a better place than Arqade: the leap from playing a board game to playing the computer version is not large, while not all PC/console gamers are going to end up playing computerized board games. Indeed, historically we've done pretty well with these kinds of questions, from the examples I was able to find.
It's also just confusing for some questions about a computerized board game to be okay, and some not. It's not great for us to define our scope in such a way that it's easy for users to make the wrong choice, or worse, easy for us to end up debating whether a question is specific to the computer version or not. For example, a recent MTG rules question turned out to be an MTGO bug - it turns out it is specific to the computer version, but this is still definitely a great place to ask it.
This also means doing a better job of helping users. Whether someone's playing the physical or the computer version of a game, we want our site to be a good place to get helpful answers, and maybe even encourage people's interest in board games.
And finally, at this point there just aren't enough of these questions to worry about. As of September 2014, Arqade had all of two questions tagged [mtg-online], and though we don't have a separate tag, with a little searching I only found maybe 6 MTGO questions. There are other computerized board game questions out there, but I don't think they're too numerous either.
So I don't think it's worth making an explicit change to our policy: it's a fairly reasonable policy, and it's not causing any problems.

The MTGO "bug" question was obviously on topic because, in order to determine if it was a bug in the first place, one must first understand the rules. The rules are clearly applicable to both the paper and electronic versions of the game.

@Rainbolt Yes, that one's easy. Not everything is that simple.

Great answer!  The only thing I'd add is that there is no expectation that each question is on topic on only one StackExchange site.  Many sites overlap coverage areas.  We respect the questioner's choice of site to ask their questions and are unlikely to migrate on-topic questions.

@PatLudwig The overlap exists because some questions are applicable to both the physical and the electronic game. There is simply no reason to keep questions that are exclusive to the electronic game. Arqade exists for that. Please apply some common sense when reading policy.

@Rainbolt - Thank you, I really appreciate your assistance in interpreting the policy page I wrote.

@Rainbolt I think I've given a couple great reasons to keep them: it's less confusing to users, and they'll get good answers here, in some cases likely better than on Arqade. If you disagree, please try to make a better argument than "it's common sense that I'm right."

@PatLudwig Is the policy you wrote immune to community interpretation?

@Rainbolt Yes, we all understand your proposed policy. But why is it a good idea? And what is wrong with the current policy? Yes, the current policy does create a little more overlap than your proposed policy. But at least a couple of us think that's a good thing, and are explaining why. You're just telling us it's common sense that we're wrong, and that it shouldn't even be debatable. It's not very convincing.

@Jefromi Sorry, I deleted my comment at the same time you responded. I'm currently revising it.

@Jefromi I didn't say that it's common sense that you are wrong. I said common sense needs to be used when applying the policy. If you decided that common sense dictates that you are wrong, then obviously you have some internal conflict that you need to sort out. As for supporting my own case, fine. Arqade exists for electronic games, therefore they are better equipped to handle such questions. It's more confusing to allow some electronic only questions here and not allow others.

@Rainbolt You've said that common sense needs to be applied, and that the conclusion is your policy, which conflicts with the site's policy - pretty clearly implying that you think the site's policy is wrong. If you want to discuss this, fine. But please try to avoid petty arguments.

@Jefromi Do feel free to address the latter half of my comment, where I ventured beyond common sense.

@Rainbolt Thank you for trying to support your position. I still disagree: Arqade does exist for electronic board games, but we exist for board games (regardless of platform). Both sites are fair places for these questions. We do not need to revise our policy to get rid of them; they get good answers where. And it's not at all confusing to take only computerized board game questions here (and not computer games in general) - I don't think anyone's going to think "oh, they take questions about MTGO? I can ask about Call of Duty."

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

Since this got upped... what about this question: Why did I win "Asia Passport" achievement early?

@freekvd If I had to decide, I'd say it was fine to ask in the first place - the OP didn't know whether it was a bug or a rules misunderstanding, just as you might not know whether a weird card in a game is a typo or a rules misunderstanding. Sure, since it turns out to be a bug, we can't fix it for the OP (and maybe they should report it), but the OP isn't asking us to fix it, they're trying to understand the game.

If a question is about a feature that is exclusive to the electronic version, it would be better off on Arqade.
Likewise, if a question is about a feature that is exclusive to the physical version of a game, then it would be better off on Board and Card Games. How do you think the folks over at Arqade would react if someone asked about how to tell if a physical Magic: the Gathering card was fake? Wouldn't that question be better addressed here?

Board/card games are definitely off topic on Arqade, so yes, questions about them would be better addressed here. (They have no exception in their scope for board game versions of computer games.) That does not imply that computerized board/card games are off topic here - in fact the site policy currently says they are. So setting that aside, all you're really saying here is "exclusive to electronic? Arqade" - which I can see being a reasonable point of view, but you really haven't explained why.

"How do you think ..."- I trust the moderators and community at Arqade to do what is right for their site and their users.  I would not take offense if they decided to keep a question that I thought would be better answered here.  They've migrated stuff to us in the past (and vice-versa).  It works out with very little drama typically.

@PatLudwig Migration typically works out with very little drama? That's great to hear, and all the more reason to migrate cleanly instead of creating overlap where there doesn't need to be any.

@Rainbolt - overlap exists for most StackExchange sites. It isn't seen as something that needs to be eradicated or even managed at the site level.  Each site is encouraged to define it's own scope.  Would you agree that voting and comments on this question validate the existing scope?

@PatLudwig I agree that most of the community is aligned with the existing scope. I'm fine with using meta questions to define the scope, but I'm not fine with using meta questions as an excuse to squash the voting habits of those who disagree with it. Normally, I'd just continue to vote the way I see it. However, since migration requests are not a "vote", and are probably handled by a select few, continuing to flag these types of questions would be a useless exercise for me. I won't continue. Pat, sarcasm free comments like the last one suit you much better. Keep it up!

@Rainbolt No one is trying to quash voting habits. People are trying to, if possible, explain why the community's predominant view is reasonable. You can certainly continue voting how you think is best - and voting to migrate is a vote; you don't have to do it by flagging. That said, if you choose to vote to close and explain your votes, it's probably best to be clear that you're explaining your opinion, not site policy.

Uh... okay, I swear that I saw a migrate close option on one of the recent questions (the old client one I think) - showing Arqade along with meta as an option - but I don't see it now, so sorry, guess you can't vote for it.

@Jefromi I also don't find the current view unreasonable. I simply find my view more reasonable. If you have trouble identifying opinions, then you might want to take a step back and just observe rather than participate. I made no attempt to mislead others into thinking that my view was the rule, and so I disagree that I was being unclear. Please consider my original comment, "I think this question belongs on [...]".

@Rainbolt Quite honestly: if you are aware that your opinion contradicts the majority view on the site, "I think" is not strong enough, and you should just explicitly say that the site policy/consensus is the opposite. Otherwise, people (especially ones newer to the site) may reasonably think that your opinion is representative, the OP may think that their question is going to get closed, and so on. At best, you're inviting restarting the same debate off of every such question, even if it's already been settled on meta.

@Jefromi It's unreasonable for people to assume that a well written explanation is representative of majority opinion. It could be that I just had a good point to make, and therefore my opinion appears, on the surface, to be so reasonable that it could be mistaken for site policy. I'm fine with that.

@Rainbolt Many experienced users on stackexchange sites will post explanations of application of site policy to a specific case and include an "I think". And many of us will not post things that directly contradict site policy. So no, it's not unreasonable for people to assume that such posts are representative of more than just your own opinion. So you really are creating potential for misunderstanding, and essentially forcing someone to come along and respond with the actual site policy.

Maybe you're okay with that, but I don't think it's a good way for a community to function. You're essentially forcing a miniature version of a debate to keep playing out on people's questions, rather than letting the community settle it on meta. (Or simply, if you disagree with policy, take it to meta - and live with the answer you get there.)

@Jefromi You simply can't turn "I think" into "We think" without the help of logical fallacies. I won't bother trying to point them out to you, because the conclusion we arrive at ("I think" is easily mistaken for "We think") just turns out to be false.

Look, I know I and we are not the same thing. I'm just saying, people speak and act in certain ways, and what you're saying is easy to misinterpret even if it's literally correct. Even if people do somehow infer from "I think" that the site policy is the opposite of your opinion (no idea how they'd do that), at best you're just being unconstructive. If the question is okay by site policy, you don't need to drag the OP into it.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.


text:
How do we feel about questions about leaked Magic cards?
This question asks about a leaked card from Aether Revolt. (In this case it turns out that Wizards has officially published it, so it's not a perfect example anymore.)
Obviously, we are not Wizards of the Coast, and we don't necessarily have to take their view or to ignore information that's already out there. At the same time, we might want to consider being considerate to readers who prefer the excitement of the planned preview season and don't want early spoilers, and we could consider not contributing to spreading leaks.
We also are already a bit mindful about answering rules questions about previewed but unreleased cards (in particular with new mechanics); leaked cards are no better in that regard.
So what should we do about questions about leaked cards? (That is, specifically unauthorized leaks, not just the usual pre-release spoiler season.)

Note that card has been officially spoiled by Wizards. source

@diego Hm, not seeing the full-art version from the question on Wizards anywhere though - is this possibly something that was an unexpected leak, then they went ahead and officially published? In any case, there definitely was a leak (acknowledged here), so something for us to think about.

It looks like the card was part of a leak with a few other promo cards, but they have since been officially spoiled. I don't know if the promo arts have been officially released yet

After sleeping on this issue I've posted some thoughts on it in BGSE chat.

I made sure to wait for wizards to reveal the card though :p the picture was even from their site (I didn't use the regular version because I couldn't find it at the time). The cards was definitively revealed here 3 days prior to me asking. The present question still stands though.

@Autar Huh. I somehow missed that article even though I use their RSS feed, then once I saw it in their official card image gallery but with normal art I looked around including reverse image search and still didn't find it, so I assumed it what they referred to in the recent daily update where they said there had been leaks.

I don't think we should close all such questions. However, I think we should be very mindful of how we handle them:

Use spoiler block quotes (>!) - at the very least for card text/images. (Images can also be linked instead of embedding.) Card text is especially unfortunate: a snippet of every question is displayed on the main page, so even people who would avoid actually clicking on the question will see it.
Avoid spoilers in titles - this will usually be pretty easy. Card names will usually be fine, with the exceptions being things like really obvious plot events or unexpected characters. "How does {card} interact with trample?" doesn't give anything away, but "How does Nicol Bolas' Triumphant Entrance work?" is a wee bit spoilery. A little common sense goes a long way here, and if a title is temporarily a little vague, that's really not a high price to pay.
Clean up - for the hopefully rare genuinely unanswerable questions that we would close regardless of spoilers (e.g. asking for unavailable rules details about new mechanics), consider deleting after closing, since there's little to no Q&A value to preserve. This could certainly happen, though: leaked cards might well have new mechanics without full rules definitions. For example, when Kozilek, the Great Distortion was leaked, we did not yet know how cost reduction effects and colorless mana costs interacted.

Many individuals actively seek out spoilers (or at least don't mind them), and they're part of our community, so answering their questions and keeping them happy is a good thing. However, many individuals don't want spoilers, and they're part of our community too, so we should be just as ready to look out for them.
I'm also only suggesting this for unauthorized leaks, not the official preview season. The official previews are all planned (one of Wizards' analogies is a movie trailer) and happen with plenty of time before release, so it's definitely a fun way for everyone to find out about a new set. The unauthorized ones don't follow that plan, and are prone to making less sense out of context, and sometimes ruining fun surprises, both in terms of mechanics and lore.

We may also need to keep track of these questions, if we do this, to de-spoiler them after release.

@doppelgreener Yeah - I don't anticipate it being all that common, though, since there aren't usually that many leaks.

I have something to add to doppelgreener's answer.
A friend of mine who runs a bot ring on MTGO (which is a legitimate activity if you follow the rules) has reason to believe that leaks hurt the sales of cards. Wizards of the Coast pays hundreds of people to build up the hype for each set. There is only one reasonable explanation for this: hype increases sales. And as WotC suggests in the linked article, leaks negatively impact hype.
Is this reason, in addition to the others mentioned in doppelgreener's answer, compelling enough for us to deviate from our primary mission of answer answering questions? Not in my opinion. Let's allow questions about leaked Magic cards.

I would also keep in mind that hype means the excitement of members of the Magic community, including members of our community here, so even if we don't care enough about sales to do anything, we might still care about the hype and excitement in and of itself. Probably still not enough to outright close/delete such questions, but perhaps enough to be strict about spoiler tags and spoiler-free titles.

We should be able to freely ask and answer questions about leaked cards.
The desire of some people to avoid spoilers is understandable and valid. However, while I am considerate of these people, the pragmatic value of Stack Exchange's mechanisms should not be held secondary to a portion of the population's desire to separate themselves from readily available information of public importance. We cannot be a no-spoiler-cards zone.
Spoiler season brings up important rules questions, and there will be people seeking to evaluate cards ASAP. There are real stakes hanging on these people being able to get serious answers — people may be putting money on the line with card preorders, or seeking to better understand the new cards and the new meta in advance of pre-release tournaments and the pro-tour, and they need information about new cards which we can and should endeavour to provide.
You also seem to suggest (in your third paragraph) there's reason to be wary of evaluating cards to soon, but when cards like Yehenni's Expertise exclusively use well-understood pre-existing mechanics, we can almost certainly provide a fairly reliable answer. Should the rules happen to change in some way during release which invalidates our advice, that sucks and we'll do an after-the-fact correction, but even if our advice turned out wrong given new information, a 95%-reliable best estimate of what will happen is far better for people needing that advice than getting no evaluation at all.

One thing we could possibly do to make ends meet here (between the need to ask & answer about leaked cards, and the desire of some people to not learn anything about them) is to make questions about leaked cards spoiler-safe. I don't have a suggestion for how to successfully implement this here, but it is an option that other sites have made available.
On sites like Scifi SE, if a Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince question was asked shortly after release with this title:

Why did Snape kill Dumbledore?

it would get edited to this title instead:

Why did Snape kill this person?

with the spoilery details in the question body put in spoiler quotes (>!).
There may be some version of this practice that will work on this site, but I don't know what it is. (Not all question titles can simply refer to unreleased cards as "this Aether Revolt card".)
Maybe we could have a set tag (e.g. mtg-aer or mtg-aether-revolt) for people who want to ignore spoilers to ignore?

A friend of mine who runs a bot ring on MTGO says that when spoiler season is ruined by tons of leaks, it dramatically affects the sales of cards. This is not covered in your answer, and in my opinion, this is the most compelling reason to not allow the spread of leaks. That said, it is not compelling enough for me, because as you suggest throughout your post, answering questions is our primary goal.

@Rainbolt Right. "Protect the economy of people buying and selling cards" is not within Board Game Stack Exchange's mission statement. It's just as you said -- our mission is answering questions.

I guess my point was that even though we agree on allowing it, the answer missed the most compelling reason not to. It's still a good answer either way IMO.

@Rainbolt Having spoken to such an individual yourself, I think you're better equipped to address it than me. Would you like to post your own answer? All I know is one guy running a bot ring (is that a legitimate or illegitimate activity..?) mentioned spoiler season getting "ruined" somehow by leaks (isn't spoiler season about leaks?) and how it "drastically affects" cards -- but I don't know if that's for the better or worse of buyers or sellers. Surely more information is better for everyone? That's not something I can address.

Overall Stack Exchange is also about making communities better by making expert guidance available; I do not think spoilers negatively affect the community, and we are not here to protect the interests of various merchants to the exclusion of enlightnment of the general community.

Whether or not you believe the overall effect is negative, there are clearly individual people for whom the effect is negative.  So the spoiler tags, and avoiding revealing titles, seems like a bare minimum.

Fair enough. I gave you nothing more to work with than "My friend said so.", and I don't know what I expected to come out of that. I went ahead and wrote my own answer.

@Rainbolt I feel like that comment I posted explaining my situation might've been a bit harsh, but yeah, I don't have much to work with from any source (including background knowledge) to handle that.

What?!?! Snape kills Dumbeldore?!?! Why didn't you put that in spoilers? (Only joking, I read all the books a while ago. Though I've pretty much forgotten most of the last 2 or 3 books. Including that Snape kills Dumbledore...)

Wait, can we answer the questions correctly at all? (Yes)
Prerelease is a big deal to a lot of players, so we need to be ready to answer questions about cards — and procedurally complex mechanics like double-faced cards — before prerelease.
Most of the tools for answering questions authoritatively are provided by the set FAQ that is released around the same time as the full spoiler.
Before that, I think the questions/answers get a bit more "speculative," but I've only seen a couple of questions where I felt this was a problem. So let's assume we're fine for now
"Spoilers" in titles
The name of a card is unlikely to be a spoiler in any meaningful sense, even if it's something like a planeswalker. Talking around it weirdly just makes the title uninformative. These questions will age very poorly, for no appreciable payoff in the moment.
Use specific, clear question titles regardless of whether a card is new or old.
Spoilers in questions/answers
The point of a question is to get answer. The point of answers is to answer the questions. Someone who's asking a question about "spoiler" content — leaked, official, whatever — is accepting that they'll get a response that talks about that content.
I understand that some folks like to browse questions just for fun, but I think their interests are secondary. It's on them to decide whether to look at a question or not. And if they decided wrong, it's on them to decide to stop reading.
There's only so much we can do here, especially since it's not just a "yes spoilers"/"no spoilers" thing but a complex set of preferences about leaks, rumors, translations of foreign cards, all kinds of stuff.
If something is spoiled in an SE question, it's probably... a single card? Two cards? The rules discussion of a set mechanic? Nobody's going to be posting an entire sheet of mythics here.
As long as questions are intelligibly structured, spoiler-averse users have plenty of ways to "bail out." We don't need special rules.

This question is about unauthorized leaks, at a time when we most definitely do not have the set-based rules FAQ or tournament guidelines or anything else. Still, I certainly agree that we can answer questions. However, I'm a bit confused by your leap from us not relying on Wizards to us not fussing about spoilers. There are people who genuinely don't want spoilers, and ignoring their desires is a disservice as well.

@Jefromi rewritten

The "questions" view on the home page shows both titles and snippets, so it is very easy to find things out without actually deciding to read a question. Even if we consider those people's preferences to be secondary, we should still consider them, which makes this kind of thing less than ideal. (Or would, if it didn't turn out that Wizards officially published this one.)

@Jefromi I think the entire Questions view is less than ideal, to be honest, as all "title + some blurb of text" UIs tend to be. But it'd be trivial to add some text so the card rules are slightly "below the fold," in that example. This is the kind of edit it's totally okay to make without needing special spoiler guidelines for it, imo.

Well, it's the UI we have, so let's figure out how to be friendly within it. I'm not suggesting that we do anything crazy, just that we don't dismiss people's preferences as "no appreciable payoff". It's pretty trivial to use spoiler markdown (which will cause it to be hidden from the home page view), and be mindful of what's in the title. I'm not trying to suggest these kinds of guidelines by way of permission, but rather to encourage more people to be proactive about it.


text:
Should this question asking for explanations in diagram form be closed?
This question asks for a visual explanation of Magic's turn structure. Is that an acceptable question on our site?
And of course, if you think it should be closed based on the current wording and you think it could be tweaked to avoid it, please suggest editing rather than closing!

This question is fine. At its core, it's asking for a general summary of Magic's turn structure, specifically in visual form. Without the restriction to visual form, it would be a good question (a nice general reference thing we can point people to, even), and with the restriction it only becomes more specific.
The major arguments that have been raised are:

It's subjective, since it's asking for good or the best diagrams, and that's a subjective decision. This is an unconvincing argument since it's really not unusually subjective. All questions are implicitly asking for the best possible explanation, and we routinely use voting to sort out which one we collectively think is best. Further, the question actually provides some specific criteria for evaluation, making it even less subjective. The comments on the existing answer indeed suggest that there's some rough agreement about what would make a good answer, not people just subjectively arguing about the best possible diagram.
It's a list question, asking for a list of diagrams. This is an unconvincing argument because this really isn't the sort of fatally flawed question that label is meant for. It's simply asking for a diagram or set of diagrams which fully explain things, similar to the way a question asking for the explanation in text form would be asking for a set of paragraphs - that's not really a list. A list question, the kind we hate, is a poll, something that won't really be complete until there's a long list - like "what are the cards that combo with X?" Per this meta answer, a short way to describe list questions is "answers that have value only in aggregate", or from the help center, every answer is equally valid, or you expect more answers like your own, or there's no actual problem to be solved. That doesn't really apply here - the problem to be solved is explaining the turn structure in a clear, concise way, and while there's room for multiple answers, there's no way every possible diagram would be equally good. (Remember, every question has the issue that people can post near-duplicate answers, which will then be equally good - that doesn't make them list questions.)

A couple more arguments surfaced in the comments:

You can't prove anything about what the question invites. This argument is plainly absurd. If you read in the help center about closing questions, for example how we decide if they're too broad, it explicitly mentions things about what kinds of answers the question is asking for. This is true all over the place anywhere in the help and on meta.stackexchange.com when people discuss these things. This is a key part of how we judge questions. So no, we can't prove it, but we can discuss it and make sane decisions.
We shouldn't discuss this on meta. Again, completely absurd. If you want to discuss whether question closure is a good topic for meta, start another meta question about it, I guess, but this is what the meta.stackexchange.com FAQ say to do if you think a question has been closed in error (doing it when it's only halfway there is pretty much equivalent) and people have been doing it across the stackexchange network for years.

You second point implies that you have to literally ask for a list for it to be considered a "list question". If that were true, then every list question could hide its ugly identity by converting "Give me a list of Foo." to "Give me Foo." You don't have to explicitly ask for a list in order to get one.

@Rainbolt No, it doesn't imply that at all. I explicitly discuss what kind of answers it invites. And this question does not invite an endless stream of answers, any more than a question asking "what is the turn structure" does. That is, it says "give me foo", where "foo" is not a giant list of things.

You can't actually prove what a question invites. If that's the basis of your argument, then you should have just voted and not taken this to meta.

@Rainbolt If "you can't prove what a question invites" is the basis of your argument, then I don't think you have a real argument. The entire decision about whether a question is too broad (e.g. because it asks for a long list of things) is a decision about what the question invites.

Pointing out your inability to prove something is a valid ("real") argument.

@Rainbolt Okay, then: it is not a constructive argument. Pretty much every "should this be closed" discussion that's ever taken place on stackexchange is based on things that we cannot absolutely prove. That doesn't mean we have to throw up our hands and decide to close them all.

If by "throw up our hands and close them all" you mean "vote", then yes. That interpretation is rather extreme.

@Rainbolt Back to the point: when there's disagreement about, say, whether or not a question is asking for ("inviting") a long list of equally-valid answers, and discussion ensues, that's exactly the kind of thing we bring to meta. Close votes aren't just a private "everyone vote how you like and see what happens" thing. They're an application of site policy (that takes multiple votes so that we can't apply it unilaterally), and meta is where we handle details of site policy like that. So the fact that I discussed what the question invites is good and expected, not a reason to silently vote.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

This answer has turned into a collection of counter arguments comprised almost entirely of logical fallacies. @ikegami provided what I thought the only good point in the entire discussion, and then deleted it. He said something like "questions asking for finite lists are not as bad". If you are reading this ikegami, I would encourage you to post a logical answer. And Jefromi, I appreciate you extracting all of my points and starting your rebuttals with "This is absurd." That's really mature.

@Rainbolt The actual arguments are right at the top, and they're convincing enough for me, and presumably for the several people who upvoted. The counterarguments are necessary in order to address the comments posted on the question, since this is a continuation of that discussion. They also happen to be real arguments, not logical fallacies - trying to dismiss my entire answer as fallacy is not terribly constructive.

@Jefromi I pointed to a specific logical flaw in an earlier comment, but you also dismissed that as "not constructive". You shouldn't post answers if you can't handle being wrong.

It seems like a perfectly reasonable question to me. Its two component parts seem to be,
1) Please help me explain to newbies how to play MTG.
2) Please present your answer in chart form for the benefit of said newbies.
I found the chart helpful.


text:
Was this question a game recommendation question?
What board or card games simulate psychological warfare? asks for games which meet some specific criteria. (It's now deleted, but the details don't really affect this question.) Is this a game recommendation, or does the fact that it doesn't ask anything like which ones are good/better/best avoid that pitfall?

Yes, this is still a game recommendation question.
A game recommendation question is simply one which asks for answers which are (a list of) games meeting some criteria. If you ask for the best ones, you're additionally making it opinion-based; if you don't, you're making it broader by inviting all of them, not just good ones. Either way, you're in the situation we're trying to avoid: a potentially long list of answers, with no good way to decide which ones are good to upvote and which aren't. That is, the presence of the word "recommendation" does not mean that this is limited to questions which are asking for explicit "I think X is good" answers, it's just a general category.
Note that we've decided that all game recommendation questions are off-topic. It's true that perhaps some of them are sufficiently specific that they won't actually have a long list of answers, and those wouldn't really be so bad to have. Unfortunately it can be very difficult to tell which ones those are, and we don't want to get into debates about where to draw the line, so we've simply deemed them all off-topic. This is something that could be revisited if desired, but it's the current state of affairs.


text:
Can we get rid of the recommendations tag?
We've previously decided to ban recommendation questions and then really banned them and then decided again to remove the tag, but recommendations is still there!
To finish the job, perhaps we could:

close the last two questions: How can I arrange a Christmas gift exchange for board game geeks? and Where can I find a list of cooperative “beat the game” games?
link the game recommendations close reason to this new canonical meta question (content is from the tag wiki, cleaned up slightly), instead of the one it currently points to which is more historical
(optional) add links to the other resources to the close reason as well, along the lines of "Try chat, BoardGameGeek, or your local game store. For details on why, and more resources, see this meta question."
burninate the tag (yay?)

Does that make sense?
(This question is distinct from even the past decision to remove the tag it's a new request for certain concrete actions, not all of which were mentioned previously.)

This is a duplicate of We should remove the [recommendations] tag. The actionable items described here belong in an answer to the older question.

No, it's not a duplicate. This is a new question, making new requests for action (some of which can only be done by moderators).

And.. normally downvotes here would indicate disagreement with the ideas in the post, i.e. this plan - I know the downvoter may not be reading, but it'd be helpful to know what you don't like about it!

All right, there are no longer any open questions with the tag - it should be safe to remove. Mods - unfortunately I think it's impossible to edit close reasons, so if you agree about changing the link(s), you'd have to add a new one and deactivate the old one to do this.

We should probably also blacklist the tag.

Made the burnination request explicit, sorry I neglected to do that. We got a couple more recommendation questions (one of them tagged as such) recently, so I do think this is worth doing. Changing the close reason would be lovely (mods?), but getting rid of the tag is still good.

Looks like the community has handled these two.
We've modified the close reason to point to the canonical meta question.
I think the links in the canonical question are sufficient - cluttering the message doesn't seem like a great idea.
I don't think a grand total of three votes between the Q and A in We should remove the recommendations tag justifies the statement "decided again to remove the (recommendations) tag". Monica's point there about becoming untagged is valid. In my opinion, removing the tag needs further discussion. Is there anything on the SE meta about this?

The only questions that'll become untagged are closed questions. One more crept in since I posted this, but it was a bad usage of the tag (not about game recommendations, and was used as a meta tag) so I just removed it. I don't think I saw any other discussion about it, but I figured that the fact that the tag is explicitly described in its wiki as being for game recommendation questions (which are off topic) is a good reason not to expect it to ever make sense on any open questions. Not a huge deal though.


text:
Is this a game recommendation question?
Joe Golton's recent question asks for examples of gateway games. In a comment, he says:

I expect (and encourage) debate as to whether this question is suited to the stack exchange system, and even if it is, whether we want it for Board and Card Games.

So, before debate begins in comments there, let's ask ourselves on meta. The faq mention as off-topic questions:

Game Recommendation/Shopping questions, this includes all questions that could be phrased like:

Best game for ... ?
Which game is like ... ?

So is Joe's question an example of an off-topic game recommendation as defined in the faq? Even if it's not, should it be within the scope of the site? (Note: this said" on-topic before, but I edited to avoid unnecessary discussion, since what really matters is site scope.)

P.S. In that section of the faq, could "this includes" be changed to "including" so that it's not a comma splice? There are also some missing spaces (e.g. "Magic:The Gathering", "Axis&Allies").

Can we protect the original question till we get a result from this??? I mean to avoid noise on it until we know what to do...

@gbianchi Pat already closed the question. I voted to reopen it but I think you have a great idea - make this protected and requiring a significant amount of reputation to participate in (like over 300?). I think this is a reasonable experiment to conduct. If it demonstrates that even this restricted form of "recommendation" question (which I think of as a "well defined list" question) doesn't work well, then I can just delete it. What's the harm in conducting the experiment? There was no mechanism to comment on my "reopen vote," but this is what I would have written.

My main problem with "list" type questions (be they game recommendations or other) is that the question is asking for a list, and logically for any answer to be accepted it would need to provide such a list.  All posted answers in such questions tend to be, in essence, only 1/10 or 1/20 of the "real" answer; allowing such seems to be sending exactly the wrong message for a Q&A site which seeks canonical answers to real questions.  Whether it's on-topic or not is secondary to the fact that, as posted, the question is ill suited for this Q&A format.

What I've learned from the various responses below and @goldPseudo's comment above is that the word "recommendations" is a bit of red herring. The norm is actually "Any question whose answer is a list or a solicitation of opinions is not welcomed here." The "opinions" part was always obvious to me, but not the "list" part. So it's okay to ask for what defines a game as being a certain type of game, so long as a list (of more than a few examples just to illustrate) is not associated with the answer. Maybe the FAQ could be revised to make that clear?

A couple related meta discussions and blog posts: Meta Stack Overflow, multi-answer questions (seems dated to me), also Blog: Real questions have answers

In my opinion, this is a canonical game recommendation question, and therefore off-topic. It's a fairly well-defined one, but nonetheless, it is asking for examples of games satisfying certain constraints, which is pretty much the definition of a recommendation question. (The fact that the sole tag is "recommendations is a pretty bad sign too.) And of course, the reasons game recommendation questions were banned apply to it: there are far too many possible answers, and it will encourage similar questions. That is, even if it weren't off-topic simply for being a recommendation question, it'd also be off-topic because it's too broad (which is one of the standard close reasons).

If there were a tag called "defined-list" or something similar, I would have chosen that tag. Recommendation was the only tag that was remotely close. If the group ends up believing this is a good type of question to have, then I would suggest adopting a "defined-list" or something similar to that to imply the well defined and (close to) objective nature of the question.

@JoeGolton: The tag is a side note. The substance of my answer is the fact that the question is essentially exactly what's described as undesirable in the decision not to allow game recommendation questions.

Some examples of (closed) well-defined recommendation questions: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)  Despite having specific requirements, they're all still subjective recommendation questions. If we take out the recommendation bit, then we're just trying to make comprehensive lists of games with certain properties, which is not very interesting.

We need to be clear about what Board & Card Games isn't: it's not a site for soliciting people's opinions on game quality, nor is it a database of board games.
As soon as I read the "defined-list" argument I thought of all the closed questions we have of the form "What's a good game for n players?" When I first started participating on this site, I was tempted to ask such questions; I was excited to find a group of experienced gamers and I wanted to find out what their favorite 5-player games were. Now I agree that they're not good questions, so I'll try to use them as a context for my answer.

Bad question 1: What's a good game for 5 players? (Frequently seen with: Community wiki! One question per answer, please!) This is extremely subjective.
Bad question 2: What games can you play with 5 players? This is just
boring. It's objective, but it's a database query, not a good Q&A question.

For both of these you can do a Board Game Geek (BGG) search and sort by ranking. In the event that you're looking for a field that's not recorded in BGG's database then you could head to their forums (BGG: Gateway Board Games). BGG is a site for discussion and opinions.

Good question 1: What is a "5-player" game? Okay, so this particular question isn't great because it's so obvious, but the type of question is good: terminology. The original "What is a Gateway Game" question is an example of this type. It's a good question.
Good question 2: Five can
be a difficult number of players to find a good game for. You can't
have even teams, and turn-based games can feel slow unless turns are short. What characteristics can a turn-based game have so that it doesn't feel too slow with 5 people?

A good answer for this last question should cite some games (after all, answer from experience!), but specific games should not be the answer. For example, games like Dixit or Apples to Apples have have everyone involved on every turn, 7 Wonders uses simultaneous drafting so that people are taking their turns at the same time, and Citadels has very short turns, many of which have some interaction and suspense for everyone. But the examples are just that, they provide back-up for the main points of the answer.

Interesting answer. I think what I've learned from all this is that the word "recommendations" is a bit of red herring. The norm is actually "Any question whose answer is a list or a solicitation of opinions is not welcomed here." The "opinions" part was always obvious to me, but not the "list" part. So it's okay to ask for what defines a game as being a certain type of game, so long as a list (of more than a few examples just to illustrate) is not associated with the answer.

Thanks! Perhaps this needs a specific mention in the FAQ (assuming the community agrees with me). Though I have seen some exceptions on other Stack Exchange sites (they tend to be "protected" and "not an example of a good question"), I think what we want is questions where there's a strong possibility that one answer can be complete enough to be accepted.

It's not so much that this is a terribly bad question in and of itself, as that I can already think of a million other questions which become askable if this is allowed.  "What games contain meeples?"  Any game with meeples is an objectively correct answer to such a question, but it's still not am interesting question except for the purposes of garnering a million upvotes and downvotes.  Disguising a recommendation question with a hint of respectable "objectivity" doesn't change its nature.  Recommendation questions are NOT bad because we hate recommending things to people!  They're bad because they turn the site into a wearisome free-for-all.
Why not just ask "what is a gateway game" and be done with it, if you want a definition of them?  This question is just designed for the purpose of having a million answers, when it doesn't need to be; that was my initial reaction anyway...

It does seem like the question would be better as "What makes a good gateway game? Please provide some examples!"

I did ask the question "What is a Gateway Game" and I got a pretty good answer, but not good enough to tell me whether Monopoly, Race for the Galaxy, Ra, etc. are Gateway Games, though the comment stream following the accepted answer helped me get closer to determining what a Gateway Game actually is. I guess I could take @AlexP's suggestion and ask a new question,  "What makes a good gateway game? Please provide some examples" and see what happens.

Ok I did take @shujaa's suggestion to edit my original question: http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/7399/what-is-a-gateway-game . I requested a more precise definition that handles borderline cases - we'll see how it goes.

This is not a bad question, but could be potentially bad in time. The list could go forever and it could be very subjetive.
Take for example that next month a new game appear, the list should change, and voting on that list will represent something like a pool, where people vote for the best game (not answer). So How could a new user that comes to the site could get a representative view of the site itself?? Also it will lead to a lot of questions that pools for answers.
I think this is like Chuck Norris Fact!
You will not have a answer for this.. I should said that this maybe come to meta and be public?
Also I would like to add, How the user will vote for the answers. And another thing to add is maybe (if this go on) we should protect the questions to avoid flooding of comments.

I came up with this idea in the context of How do we get questions per day count up? My answer is buried there so here it is again, as it is a possible answer to the above question:
Game recommendation questions were (are) so popular that I think it's worth brainstorming what kinds of templates could be used to solve some of the issues they bring up. I think there's an objective type of question here that is being completely ignored: an answer which is an objective (or nearly objective) list.
Example of non-game question: What towns are within 4 miles of London, England?
The answer to this is objective, right?
Example of very objective game question: What games were made by EON before it went out of business? Please provide one game per answer with either a brief description of the game (this particular Q is low value because you can easily find the information elsewhere).
Now for one that has a little subjectivity creep in (and for which I actually want to know the answer!):
Which games are obviously Gateway Games, where gateway games are defined as . . . Please list one game per answer so the answer can be voted up (if it's a Gateway Game) or not voted if it's not a Gateway game.
I know that stack exchange mechanisms are not particularly well suited to this type of question, but if you can nail down a precise definition for "Gateway Games" (which was attempted here), then the answer to this is actually an objective list, just like the answer to towns within 4 miles of London. Not only that, the objective list would be roughly ordered by popularity and degree of adherence to the definition, which adds additional value.
I would love to see questions like this. Other examples:
Which wargames offer simulations on a squad level that are on par with Squad Leader?
Which games have had the largest influence on Game Design over the past 40 years? Please list one game per answer and describe the influences this game has had on the industry?
What games can be enjoyed at various levels of complexity, such that both a 6 year old and a game-loving adult parent might enjoy playing together? Candyland does not meet this criteria as it is boring for game-loving adults. Bridge neither because it is far too difficult to learn. Rat-A-Tat-Cat, Backgammon, and Checkers are good candidates for this list because they can be enjoyed immediately at a very simple level but actually have significant strategy components that can be mastered over time and are therefore of interest to game-loving adults. Please list one game per answer and provide some reasons for both the adult and the child to enjoy the game. If there is a way to handicap the game, please include that information (i.e. Checkers - adult can start with 1 or 2 pieces removed).
TLDR; Can we do a restricted form of Game Recommendations where the questions have answers that are lists that are objective or close to objective, because they adhere to well defined criteria?

You seem to be suggesting that the main problem with game recommendations is that the constraints aren't well-defined or that they're subjective. I'm not sure this is the case; see for example the question I linked to in my answer.

@Jefromi I did read that and thought that perhaps there could be a way of addressing some of the valid objections to recommendation questions. Namely: Objective - with careful definitions the answers can be objective. Learning - I still don't have a crystal clear definition of Gateway games. It remains to be seen - but I think it's possible I will better understand what makes a good Gateway game after my new question is up for a week or two. It's an experiment and it may fall flat - or it may lead to an entirely new set of possible, objective questions.

Give up.  You mean well, but the community here is all about rigidly following rules rather than trying to make something compelling.

Not only do I think that list questions cause all sorts of problems for the SE engine, but I think trying to "build the site" on the basis of questions that ask for a list of games will clearly fail when compared to the existing site whose entire interface is centered around creating lists of games.

@bwarner There ISN'T any site whose entire interface is centered around creating high quality, well defined lists. I've even been looking into it and the only thing that comes close to being good is http://www.goodreads.com/list which is for books only. I'm aware of and very underwhelmed by BGG game lists. From the reaction I've received here, everyone is convinced that stack exchange can't be adapted to questions whose answer is a well defined list. I'm not convinced of that, but there's no point in me trying any more experiments given the strong resistance to the idea.

@RobRenaud: It's not really that simple. Site after site has tried to allow certain kinds of list questions, generally in formats very close to this, then realized that they just don't work out - they tend to become unwieldy, unusable, outdated lists. (Yes, there are exceptions, but this is generally true.) This isn't really the community's fault, it's just the way things go with the StackExchange format. If they had something more like Google Moderator, for example, it might work better. But in the meantime, responsible communities avoid it.

If you want some convincing of this, try searching for "answers:11" to see questions with more than ten answers, on any stackexchange site, and ask yourself how well the system really works on those questions.

@Jef Tried "answers:11" search (thanks for that tip!) on B&CG. I thought the top few questions had useful results. What was especially interesting though was that the set of questions with the most favorites overlaps heavily with the set of questions having 11 or more answers. This suggests to me that for B&CG in specific, reasonably well defined lists are extremely useful, and that the stack exchange system, while not perfect for it, is better than many other systems out there (i.e. BGG system for lists). I have noted that product rec Qs on bicycle stack generally suck.But seems good on B&CG.

@Jefromi Something about B&CG seems fundamentally different to me than most other stacks. One of the keys to enjoyable gaming is understanding why you enjoy certain games and occasionally buying more games like them. Anything that helps with that is really valuable. Good help for that is friends, funagain.com, BGG, and yes, B&CG stack (the closed questions). None of these are perfect, but I've actually found B&CG to have the highest quality lists among these 4 sources. I'm not going to push it here. But seems like there's a great idea for a "well defined list" startup. Maybe I'll do it.


text:
Copied tag wikis
I've seen a couple tag wikis added recently that apparently were copied verbatim from BoardGameGeek: catacombs and viticulture.
I rejected them as suggested edits, using the canned "copied content" reason:

This edit copies a significant amount of content from an external source. Generic descriptions such as encyclopedia articles and ad copy do not provide useful guidance; try creating something useful to this community specifically, and be sure to attribute the original author. See: How to reference material written by others.

but they were approved by others. I know BGG descriptions are also user-edited, but I don't think there's any way to make this okay without total rewriting (I don't see a CC license or anything on BGG, so merely adding attribution would not be sufficient) so:

Could I get some help looking through tag wikis for other copied content?
Could others help remove the copied content we've discovered (those and others - see answers)? Trusted users (4k rep) can do this themselves, while others will have to make suggestions.
Could a moderator acknowledge having seen this? We have no way to notify these users that this is not acceptable, since the edits were long since approved, so it's up to you if you want to superping in chat or anything.

And of course, in the future we need to be a bit more vigilant reviewing those edits.

There should be no reason to remove the tag wikis if proper attribution is added.

@JoeW At the very least, the excerpts need to be rewritten, since there's no way to make them clearly quotes and provide attribution inside the excerpt (which is all most people see). And I'm pretty skeptical about tag wikis (outside the excerpts) which are simply large block quotes. That canned rejection reason makes it fairly clear that's not the idea of tag wikis, even if it's not plagiarism with the attribution - anything that's mostly copied is supposed to be rejected, and this is allco-op copied. ("It's not technically plagiarism" isn't exactly a resounding endorsement of content.)

(If I've missed something and BGG is CC-licensed or something, then it might be okay to use in the tag wiki body, but as far as I can tell they haven't given people the right to copy their content wholesale like this.)

In the terms of use. 'By uploading User Submissions to Geekdo, you hereby grant each user of the Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display, and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service.'

@JoeW as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. unless the ToS includes copying text verbatim onto other sites (either explicitly or via very broad terms like CC), we can't use the copied text and must, at minimum, paraphrase it.

I think the best course of action would be to contact BGG, and check if they see an issue.
If the description from BGG is fine, and SE description would carry the same information, while using the different words solely to avoid "plagiarism" then such rewording is just a waste of human effort.
If the description can indeed be improved to better fit SE, then that's a matter separate from this one.

@tsuma534 Go ahead if you like - it doesn't appear it's meant to be copied wholesale, but I suppose it's possible. Doesn't make it okay that it was copied without attribution, though. Plagiarism isn't something you can make go away by putting quotes around the word.

@Jefromi I would need one such plagiarized tag as an example, so I could have a better idea what am I messaging about. The ones in this thread are already cleared.
But I can at least improve the tags for the games I know. This should be done in few days.

@tsuma534 You should be able to see revision history on the tag wikis.

Also worth noting that the copied content rejection reason applies even with attribution, and that it explicitly calls out ad copy (e.g. publisher's description) as not useful. Many of the tag wikis we found here were in fact publisher descriptions, and the BGG descriptions are often same or similar to those.

I've cleaned up all tag wikis listed in my answer and freekvd's as of 19:30 January 4 UTC.
In all cases I rewrote excerpts, since they don't leave room for clear attribution, and moreover, taking the first paragraph of a game description does not make a good excerpt. For those that were obviously publisher's descriptions, I left block quotes. For others, I left only the useful links if present.
I flagged the question and it was marked helpful, so a moderator has seen this. I assume that means they're okay with things as they are!

I've gone through the suggested edits review queue history back to August.
This user:

Lord of the Rings
Epic Spell Wars (copied from manufacturer's description - probably okay with attribution added? but still, sounds like an ad, not a tag wiki)
Little Red Riding Hood

Expansion Adrift is entirely a block quote from the publisher - suppose that's okay (but meh) as well. Also the excerpt ends with "From the publisher:"

This is certainly a problem. I think I was one of the people accepting these edits, it never occurred to me to check the internet for plagiarism.
I found a couple of potential candidates by going through the user pages of the two edits you mentioned. Note that I haven't done any in-depth checks on these edits, but a lot of them read the same way as the ones you're linking to.
From this page:

Catacombs
Mountains of Madness
Samurai Spirit
CV
Shadows of Brimstone
Monopoly Empire
Awesome Kingdom
Tzolkin

Two more from a different user:

Viticulture
Lords and Ladies

I may well have approved some of those before too. I'm not sure what it was that caused me to think of checking this time. Thanks for looking through those - I'll try to see look through some examples not by those users too.

Shadows of Brimstone's wiki matches a forum post (though a lot of the content is in the BGG entry too). Monopoly Empire and Tzolkin match the publishers' product descriptions, which I'm guessing are okay to quote with attribution.

I'm guessing that a lot of BGG descriptions are also copied from publishers (possibly with modification) so some of these may actually be slightly more okay than others (with attribution), but I think it's a bit beyond our purview here to clean up.

@jefromi there's another tag wiki currently in revision by user Beewee, that's a copy of the Fantasy Flight product page. I think we should inform him that this is not how tag wiki pages should be used, but I don't know how to reach him.

Rejecting as copied (as we did) seems like about all we can do here - if they're paying attention it'll be enough. I did ask for mod help; they're the ones who can contact users privately if desired (plagiarism is one of the templates for that, so it's definitely a possibility) or ping them in chat even if they haven't been there.


text:
Should I be more patient with my open questions during the site's Beta phase?
Since we have so few questions and so few visits per day, I'm reluctant to accept an answer for one of my questions. The answers are tied for votes and I'd really rather have more opinion from other gamers on the subject.
I think part of the issue is that game-specific questions (especially those about more obscure games) are less likely to have a great answer because only a fraction of the small community here will have played that game, and an even smaller fraction will feel like they can give a good answer based on their experience.
I think it would be bad to avoid accepting a good-to-great answer just for the sake of having more open questions. But is it acceptable (for now) to be slower to accept answers that have few upvotes or are in the okay-to-good range?

I have two questions open right now, and I'm leaving them open for the moment specifically for this reason.  Granted, the older of the two open questions isn't even a day old...

I've only asked one question so far, but I definitely left it open (no checkmark) far longer than I normally do on Stack Overflow.  Accepting an answer usually has the effect of closing down a question unless someone has something profound to add.  I think it's good for a young site such as this to not discourage new answers.

You are under no obligation to accept an answer.  If you feel that none are suitable answers then definitely leave it open.
You may be right in that we don't yet have a large enough community to answer all questions about all games.  You do have other options though.

Offer a bounty on your question
Rework your question to address the answers that have been given
Comment on the answers that have been given showing how they do not address what you are trying to find.

There are several upvoted answers to your question so this will not show up as "Unanswered".  I imagine this limits traffic to the question if there is no recent activity on the question.  In order to get more eyeballs on it you will have to keep it active (in a productive way).

I'm more concerned with the general policy about accepting an answer than I am about figuring out how to get the question that I referred to as an example answered. That being said, I do find your commentary about my specific question to be helpful. Thank you.

I know the feeling. I personally have started to leave such questions open but upvote helpful answers. Over on Gaming.SE I once accepted one of the answers and later found a far better one had been posted. Since that was several months ago I was unable to change the accepted answer.
So. If you're not truly satisfied with an answer - don't accept it.
Like Pat said, it won't hurt the site's statistics as long as there is at least one upvoted answer...

I wasn't aware that SE had a limit on when you can change an accepted answer... you learn something every day, I suppose.

Seems to me like that is a bug, given this text from meta.SO: "You may change which answer is accepted, or simply un-accept the answer, at any time."

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/


text:
Would my question be better off converted to Community Wiki?
I'm not really a fan of Community Wiki posts; I share some of the same points of view expressed in the post Community Wiki: desirable or not? (both for and against). But as time goes on, the idea that my question, How have editions of Bang! been different from previous ones?, may be better as Community Wiki is growing on me.
Pros

People are likely to answer about one edition of the game at a time anyway, so this could limit the answers to one answer per edition.
Details about each edition's differences can be "filled out" by the combined knowledge of several people, reducing the intimidation factor for those who feel they know only a little.
Appears to be more in line with the Stack Exchange philosophy.
The "finished product" would likely be higher quality because (most) anyone can improve any of the answers they wish to.

Cons

Little-to-no incentive to add to the answers. I believe the Stack Exchange reputation model's "gaming" mechanic is a major part of Stack Exchange's success; economics and psychology (e.g., concepts related to Flow) both support this argument.
Barrier to entry (low-rep users can't contribute)
No way to reward people who helped me by answering my question.

If the cons could be fixed, I would definitely request the post be converted to Community Wiki. However, assuming the status quo for the way Community Wiki works, I'm not sure Community Wiki status is the best way to go.
Regardless of your interest in the actual game, would you convert that question (or similar questions) to Community Wiki if it was up to you (and only you)? Why or why not? What would you define the "policy" for Community Wiki to be with regards to this type of question?

FYI - only moderators can turn questions into Community Wiki.  CW should only be used for questions that need more collaborative editing.  Your question may fall under that criteria, and I wouldn't be adverse to switching it.

@Pat, thanks. I'll modify my question to reflect the fact that I'd need to have a moderator take care of it. (As an aside, I thought I read that a post would be automatically changed to CW once it's been edited more than something like 15 times. Does that apply to questions as well?)

Yes, I think it is a sliding scale.  Around 8 edits in one day, more as time goes on.  Also a certain number of self-edits don't count.

@Pat: Thanks. I didn't know that. Also, I hope the modification is okay; it turned out to be more of an overhaul than I thought it would be.

We have provided some additional guidance at the blog:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/
TL;DR version

Most of the time, you should be asking yourself “How can I improve this post so that community wiki isn’t needed?” Community wiki is like a cheese knife: it is a specialized tool to be used sparingly, and only in very specific circumstances.