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Can a new answer to an old question be highlighted somehow?
TL;DR: Stack exchange incentives discourage answering/improving old questions that have an accepted answer. Would highlighting new answers help with this?
I've answered 2 questions that were over a year old and already had 3 or more answers. In each case I did this because I thought I had a substantially better answer for games in which I have a lot of experience. The mechanics of stack exchange make new answers buried beneath many other answers and thus not noticed. The new answer is unlikely to be accepted as the question originator is often no longer participating in the site, or even if they are don't get voting information to help decide if the new question merits acceptance.
Stack Exchange was initially conceived for developers who had objective questions with typically one objective answer. But the way Board and Card Games has evolved, questions about strategy are popular and typically have multiple possible answers. Furthermore, rules change over time which can change the correct answer to a question (see What to do when an answer is no longer correct?). As rules change, and more importantly as new people join the site who may have different (and sometimes better) strategy ideas, it would be great if there were a way to temporarily highlight a new answer so it could be seen and considered. If not bubbled to the top, perhaps a brightly colored link to the new answer that lasts for 3-6 days. This would provide an incentive for people who think they have a potentially better answer to post it to an older question - they'll know that there's a real chance people will see the answer and vote/comment on it.
Examples:
What are good placement strategies for Stratego? (I believe I can beat someone who always uses the strategy of the top answer at least 80% of the time, so I provided a competing answer)
What are the key strategy differences between Settlers of Catan and Seafarers?  (I agree with the top answer but it is not even close to comprehensive, so I provided a more comprehensive competing answer)
Based on the reception for my answers to these questions (few views, few votes, no comments), I am inclined to not answer old questions in the future (that have more than 3 answers already). I would imagine more seasoned participants figured this out long ago and never bother trying to come up with better answers to old questions.
I'd like to hear from others whether it makes sense to highlight new answers to old questions (at least temporarily), thus providing more incentive for people to come up with better answers to old questions. This could lead to more improvement in older questions than currently happens. Obviously, if most people feel this would not improve site quality, then it's not worth doing.

Both answers address a portion of my question but I realize that my main point about quality improvement incentives was lost. So I added a TL;DR and bolded text to highlight the incentive issue. The availability of sorting tools and recency info (as described in 2 answers below) does not result in new answers to old questions getting similar numbers of views as if the answer had been given within a day of the question being asked.

Related: Is it worth answering a question for which an answer has already been accepted?, How to bring attention to an old question you didn't ask to bring it up to date

As others have mentioned, this is status-bydesign and is unlikely to change.
However, I would like to encourage you to selectively answer old questions at least occasionally if you think you can provide a better answer.
Reasons:

Make the world a better place.  This is the big one.  Traffic here is continually inching upwards and what seems to be a low-view question now may change in the future.
There are incentives!  These are some of our more difficult (yet still achievable) Badges

https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/badges/73/excavator
https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/badges/44/necromancer
https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/badges/59/revival

Your answer could spark a revival in the question.  It will get bumped to the front page and evaluated fresh.
Your answer could spark a revival in the game(via the tag) on the site. I've received 1 upvote for 3+ questions at a time quite frequently.  I assume that is when someone discovers that "Yes, B&CG does cover that game, cool!" and goes thru reading all the old questions we have.  Folks are more likely to get this serendipitous discovery from our front page questions.
The questioner may switch their accepted answer (or award it for the first time) - Although this is pretty rare, I have lost several accepted marks from people who came in much later with more comprehensive answers than mine were.  I've also gained a couple by coming in later too, it works both ways!

If your goals are strictly the gameification, then perhaps old questions are not the best "bang for your buck", but I think a few well placed answers to older questions can benefit the site and yourself just fine.
Now I'm going to test my theory by inserting this answer to your 5 month old question :)

@user1873 - lol, No harm in trying!

@user1873 - Do you like my shiny new necromancer? :)  Sorry, couldn't help showing off!

I am quite impressed. As a moderator though, your answers will recieve more attention and upvote because of that little diamond. The same is probably true of 10k users. Joe would have a much harder time gameifying points in this way.

There are three sorting options for answers:
Active, Oldest, and Votes.
Until your answer gets some votes, it will be lowest on the vote view (obviously), but not all users sort this way. If I see that a question on the mainpage with a relatively old OP, I often toggle between active and votes.

Never noticed that before. Just tested "active" and it showed the accepted answer first, and then sorted by most recently active thereafter. I wonder how many people know to do this? Before you pointed this out, my method was to manually scan for answer dates and edit dates, which is obviously cumbersome. I've learned that given identical numbers of votes, a recent answer on average is better than an older answer, which makes sense given that it had fewer views, and thus fewer voting opportunities.

+1 this works the same all sites around so you should get use to it to know that ;)

A new answer pops the question on the main page, and clicking on the edit time takes you to the new content.  Plus, as The Chaz said, you can sort explicitly.  I think these affordances provide enough navigation to the newest answers.


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How do we handle the situation where the answer is the same for many different questions?
Something is clearly not working when several times per year, there are seemingly different questions are asked and marked as duplicates, because the answers are identical. Or in other words, the fact that I am the umpteenth person to ask some version of this question because I was unable to find the answer in 10-15 minutes of searching the internet and B&CG suggests that something is broken.
This is a failure of search or perhaps a failure of the stack overflow Q&A system for this sort of question.
Here is the question I asked that triggered this:
https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/27622/when-multiple-cards-get-triggered-which-goes-on-the-stack-first
Here are a couple questions that well answer the question I initially had:
What order do triggered abilities happen in if multiple things trigger at the same time?
Pyxis of Pandemonium and 'enters the battlefield' abilities
Multiple permanents entering the battlefield simultaneously and “Enter the Battlefield” effects
Cards entering the battlefield simultaneously and "Enter the Battlefield" effects
This is just a sampling of what is available. There seem to be at least 15 versions of the question. Some of the questions are great with mediocre answers. Some of the questions are too narrow or less-than-optimal for other reasons yet had great answers. Some question/answer pairs were excellent but I could not have possibly found them because the questions were so different from what I asked.
I searched for 10 minutes on the internet then another 5 minutes on B&CG before asking the question, because I had not yet found an answer. The difficulty is that there is a single answer that is the same to many seemingly very different questions. For example, entering the battle field seems quite different than damage resolution - yet either of them can cause multiple cards to trigger which lead to the same answer.
I understand the answer now but the questions that had good answers were quite different from my initial question - none of them had to do with multiple cards triggering due to damage assignment.
I'm wondering how messes like this can be resolved to make it easier for people to find the answer to their question, when many very different versions of the question lead to the same answer?
It seems to me that one possible way to handle this is to somehow exploit an understanding of how stack overflow's search engine tends to work, so as to perhaps stack a bunch of different versions of the question and appropriate keywords into one, canonical version of the question and answer.

Honestly, I'm having a hard time imagining how you searched before posting. I put your question title verbatim into Google, and every one of the first five hits contained the answer to your question. Simple site searches with obvious keywords from your question also directly lead to the questions you linked.

@murgatroid99 for every mtg question I pose to B&CG, I have asked at least 50 that I found the answers to efficiently. Somehow I missed on this one - not sure what I did wrong with my keywords. I think the interesting thing here is that you can find literally over 15 questions on B&CG that have roughly the same answer, of which mine was just one. I think it's rare for a particular issue to generate so much duplication. The answer below is pretty good in terms of saying "that's okay - some issues are just like that and therefore end up with massive amount of duplication pointing to same Q&A.

To start, we know the internal site search is bad at finding new information; it always has been. It's OK at topic searches, using tags, and it's fine for finding particular questions you've seen before, but if you have a question and you're looking for an answer, you're better off using Google Search.
Years ago, Jeff Atwood wrote a blog post on the official StackOverflow blog called Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication. As it says

One thing I want to be clear about, though, is that duplication is not necessarily bad. Quite the contrary -- some duplication is desirable. There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds people can find the answer they’re looking for. And isn't that, really, the whole point of this exercise?

You asked a question, and then it got closed as a duplicate, and now you have your answer. I'd say that the system worked.

OP said he searched the Internet (I assume Google search) for ten minutes.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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Attribution requirements for answers
Last night I provided this answer and had a conversation (of sorts) with Pat about my lack of attribution (feel free to check out the original answer, which isn't substantially different other than the lack of link and that I'd gotten some inconsequential details incorrect). I'd originally gotten downvoted for that, with the suggestion that I find the link again.
I don't think this is a big deal, but it did make me wonder...is it worth potentially reducing the number of answers by discouraging items that aren't cited on this particular site? In my case, my information came from an article written by Eric Martin. I don't know him personally, but I do know that we used to attend the same smallish convention a few years back. If I'd gotten the info from a face-to-face conversation, I wouldn't be able to cite it, but my answer wouldn't have changed significantly. Would that still be an inappropriate answer (even if it's true)?
I certainly understand the point of view of requiring attribution for things; we certainly don't want this to become Yahoo Answers. I especially think it's necessary on the more hard science areas of SE, or for things like rules questions where there needs to be a single, unambiguous answer. However, for questions like this one, I'm wondering if we'd be better off with unsourced answers than things that could be left unposted due to them being unattributable. Thoughts?

First, I need to put on my moderator hat to answer

There is no attribution requirement for answers here at B&CG

Ok, moderator hat off, user hat on (this is the hat I used when I downvoted/commented on the answer in question.
Your answer originally began,

I don't have a link now, but I read something at one point discussing "suggested age" on games.

As a user, I couldn't get past that.  I am a strong believer in the "Back It Up! Principle" in that answers should be based on:

Something that happened to you personally
Something you can back up with a reference

Our faq leads off with:

Board and Card Games - Stack Exchange is for expert Q&A from people who like playing, discussing the strategy of, and getting rules clarifications of board games, designing board games or modifying the rules of existing board games.

To me, expert Q&A and the Back it Up! Principle go hand in hand.  If you haven't gone through the process of setting age restrictions on a published game, and can't cite a specific reference to someone who has then your answer is weak, an opinion, and I would go so far as to say, "Not Useful".  The tooltip for the down vote arrow is, "This answer is not useful."
Whenever I see a question so clearly crying out for an expert answer I will likely downvote any answer that doesn't say "expert" to me.  This isn't a forum, everyone doesn't need to have an opinion on every question.  There are plenty of places you can go where such answers are welcome.
Everyone else is free to decide what "useful" means to them and vote accordingly.

Thanks; this makes a lot of sense. Pat Ludwig, user, is naturally welcome to downvote any answer that he doesn't find useful; my question was because I thought Pat Ludwig, moderator, was making a broader statement (a faulty assumption on my part). I agree that my answer is much better now than it was with the attribution, but your diamond just made me wonder if this was a more philosophical issue. Thanks for clarifying!

@VolcanoLotus - Cool, the confusion with the two hats is something I think every moderator worries about to some extent. I'm not sure what the solution is.

I think you can still reference an in-person conversation: just write "Game designer Eric Martin told me ..." It doesn't meet the requirements for formal attribution, but it does explain where the information came from and why it's authoritative.

But why is me saying I had a conversation with Eric Martin any more authoritative than me saying I read something Eric Martin wrote without providing a link? Either way, you have to trust me that I'm not willfully misrepresenting and trust my memory that I'm accurately recalling the situation. I tend to agree that it should be OK, but it seems like then links wouldn't be needed either.

@VolcanoLotus: I believe the links are simply requested since they are 'possible' to provide - unlike an irl conversation that makes this pretty much impossible. Naturally, you're right in that it doesn't certify the credibility, but it does add some trust value at least as it explains why there is no "better" attribution.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Is it a good or bad idea to cite your own question-relevant experience(s)?
From my initial read of the generic Stack Exchange FAQ, I was under the impression that answers from personal experience are not just encouraged, they are preferred. Right? If so, does it not then follow that one should cite specific expertise experience(s) that might help lend credibility to an answer, on a topic for which little public information is available and no mathematical proof is possible?
The specific example is the question I asked about age suggestions:
How do game designers come up with suggested (or minimum) age requirements for games?
Aramis's answer seemed reasonable, especially after some clarification in the comments. But when he told me that it was based on some experience as a game designer and extensive experience as game tester, the answer improved even more for me as I wasn't sure if it was just a best guess or based on experience. In my mind, this convinced me that I should "accept" this answer (though I haven't quite yet in case a better answer comes along to this fresh question). So I suggested to Aramis in comments that he add the following sentence to his answer:
"Based on a few games I've designed and extensive play-testing where suitability for children was a common designer question, here's what I've learned . . ."
Aramis did not think this was a good line to add to the answer. He stated that, "In fact, that's one of the things that, in my undergrad, we were taught to treat as a fallacy - anyone whose sources must include their bonafides in order to be credible is probably including them solely to be credible at all."
I'm not getting this. While some types of questions have a strictly objective answer based on mathematical proof or have publicly available information to cite, other types of answers may depend on having actual specific experience. This seems like one such instance.
So for this example, and for other questions of this nature, is it a good or bad idea to cite your own question-relevant expertise experience(s)?

I think my initial wording of the question was confusing as I used the words experience and expertise interchangeably. But they really mean different things. So I conformed to the word "experience" which is much closer to what I really meant. Someone with industry experience to know of the standard operating procedures in that industry (in this case how suggested ages are determined) is more important than theoretical or award-bestowed expertise.

Good or bad idea to cite your own experience?  I choose neither.  I have no problem with folks citing their experience, or not, as they desire.  I also support other people asking what the basis of the answerers knowledge is.  We can't force it though.
For me, a great subjective answer must follow the "Back it up" principle in that either the answer:

Must be supported by citing specific sources
Must be from the answerers personal experience.  Either something they did, or witnessed directly.

As I did on another answer to your question I will likely downvote and/or challenge any unsourced answer.  Often, as I think it did in this case, the answer will get vastly better.
As an alternative to citing personal experience, consider that StackExchange has our own system of tracking how likely people are to be giving good answers.
Reputation
It is fairly easy to see how trusted a particular user is with the site, and any particular tag.
If you check out aramis you see that he has a significant amount of reputation here and on SciFi, he has a ton of reputation on RPG. That can give you a certain level of good feeling that his answer comes from a base of game knowledge.
Looking a bit farther, he is the #1 user on game-design here on B&CG.  Using a little search-fu, you can pull up the answers directly to examine and judge for yourself.
TL;DR
I think that Reputation and a little investigation can yield much of the information you are seeking.  Newer members may have to be challenged more often to obtain their bona fides but once someone has a few thousand rep, you can generate a pretty good picture of their expertise.

Thanks - I learn something new about SE almost every time you answer a meta Q. In this case, I hadn't know that you could click on a tag to find out which people have lots of rep - that is certainly a helpful indicator that someone has experience.

@JoeGolton - Thanks!  There is a lot to discover in the SE interface for sure.  Seems to always be something new when I go poking around :)

I found two stack exchange sources relevant to this question after extensive searching:
Should Stack Exchange make room for conjecture and/or knowledge based answers?
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/
The first is only mildly related and emphasizes that citations are not necessary and actual experience is valued:

there's always room for conjecture, knowledge, and experience to fuel
  your answers. That's why the voting system works, after all. It allows
  us to vet things with our own experience and testing, our own
  understanding of material.

The second is a blog post which discusses best practices for answers that are subjective in the sense of not being provable or something you can cite. This SE blog encourages the community to follow 6 principles developed by the moms4mom group. Here are principals 4 and 5:

4: Great subjective questions invite sharing experiences over
  opinions. Certainly experiences inform opinions, but the best
  subjective questions unabashedly and unashamedly prioritize sharing
  actual experiences over random opinions. It’s more useful to share
  with us what you’ve done than what you think. Everyone has an opinon.
  It takes zero effort or imagination to have an opinion about anything
  and everything. But people who have done things, real things in the
  world, and have the scars and arrows in their back to show for it —
  now that’s worth sharing. You should be uniquely qualified to have
  your opinion based on the specific experiences you had. And you should
  share those experiences, and more specifically what you learned from
  your experiences, with us!
5: Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with
  facts and references. Opinion isn’t all bad, so long as it’s backed up
  with something other than “because I’m an expert”, or “because I said
  so”, or “just because”. Use your specific experiences to back up your
  opinions, as above, or point to some research you’ve done on the web
  or elsewhere that provides evidence to support your claims. We like
  you. We want to believe you. But like wikipedia itself, {{citation
  needed}}. And good subjective questions make this clear from the
  outset: back it up!

The key phrase in #5 is "Use your specific experiences to back up your opinions" and the key phrase in #4 is "the best subjective questions unabashedly and unashamedly prioritize sharing actual experiences over random opinions."
If we're to follow the guidelines suggested in this SE blog post, then it does make sense to cite one's experience as related to a question and its answer.
An introduction like "Based on a few games I've designed and extensive play-testing where suitability for children was a common designer question, here's what I've learned . . ." would seem to be in the spirit of describing one's actual experiences that the answer is based on. It may not be the optimal wording (feel free to suggest improvements).
But an introduction like this does help provide the experiential context for the answer, and that makes the answer better for questions of this nature.

As a professional computer programmer and systems administrator, I have to agree with the basic point that Aramis is making; the facts should speak for themselves, and whether they come from someone "in the know" or not is irrelevant.  Prefacing one's own arguments with one's own credentials can just come off as insincere, and the argument itself is rarely if ever any stronger because of it.

I'm not a game designer, but I play one on TV.  And nine out of ten actors who play game designers on TV agree that fundamentally, there are three factors to consider when coming up with suggested (or minimum) age requirements for games...

Even if the information presented comes from the very real experience of an actor playing a game designer on TV, or even an actual game designer, that is merely one personal experience out of an industry comprising a lot more than one person.  To increase the validity of his position, referencing sources other than himself is the preferred route, rather than tacking on what essentially amounts to "I'm a professional so you should believe me."
If the question asked is one that is actually answerable, which any question on this site should be, then facts are much more valuable than personal anecdotes.  Facts remain facts regardless of who presents them.  Personal experiences can reinforce a good answer, but they should never replace it.

I understand how your answer applies to coding questions but I'm still wondering about the specific conditions where there is little or no public sources to cite and no theoretical proof possible. Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for a particular industry is an example. In this case, there is either an SOP for deciding suggested minimum ages or there is not. If there is, it is not public knowledge (at least not online, as I did Google a bit). Yet, that SOP is a fact, if it exists. Aramis has convinced me (in the comments) that he is enough of an industry insider to know what that SOP is.

Can you expand your answer to cover the specific case I'm highlighting with SOP for an industry, or more generally when there are no publicly available info sources and the answer is not amenable to proof?

@JoeGolton Whether the info sources are publicly available or not is irrelevant; facts are facts.  Credibility in the specific case would better be improved by something along the lines of "Nine out of ten industry professionals agree that..." than it would by "I am an industry professional, and my opinion is that..."

@goldPseudo A lot of answers are subjective. I think there is some value in being able to figure out where they come from -- e.g. experience vs. speculation.


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Some non-game specific questions have specific games as answers. Should these questions get game-specific tags?
Some non-game specific questions have specific games as answers. Should these questions get game-specific tags with each new game-specific answer? I think people interested in a specific game stand a good chance of being interested in such questions. For example, this one:
Which boardgames need expansion sets before they work properly?
Should it be tagged with Civilization, Settlers-of-Catan, Citadels, St-Petersburg, Carcassone, Agricola, Alhambra, and Cosmic-Encounter?

No,
Tagging is not a replacement for search.  The site has very good search capability, anyone searching for those games will find them with no trouble.

I was thinking tracking, not search. I use tag tracking on my favorite few games which causes a light blue background behind questions. Very helpful to me for staying focused on what's of interest to me. Also - at times I'll go into e-mail mode where I just receive emails on the questions of interest to me, which again will be related to my favorite tags. The question I cited was a perfect example of a question I would love to be notified about (I'm an owner of the basic Carcassone game and Settlers with just the Seafarers expansion).

Also, there's a limit of five tags per question.


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What is appropriate use of the "beginner" tag?
User BBz removed the beginner tag from 8 questions yesterday, including 3 of mine.  I don't agree with at least some of these tag removals, but on the other hand the definition of the tag isn't all that clear:

Someone who is new to a particular game and has seldom, if ever,
  played it before.

From my perspective, if I've played a simple game less than 5 times or less than a few hours, I'm a beginner. If I've played a really complex game for less than a few hundred hours (i.e. Bridge, Chess, Go), I'm a beginner. According to that definition, there are some basics of the game I still probably don't yet know. For example as a beginner I sure wish I had been given the following advice on Bridge:
Why are beginning to intermediate bridge players told to delay learning how to bid certain types of unusual hands?
As a beginner, it is really useful for me to see efficient learning method discussion like this, as well as basic strategies. Being able to pick out all the "beginner" questions for bridge and read through them (if you've spent less than a couple hundred hours playing Bridge) could be really useful for a beginner, IMO.
What do people think this beginner tag be used for?

I found two questions with the beginner tag and removed it from both.
Beginner, and terms like it are "meta" tags which are strongly discouraged on the SE network.
I also eliminated "courtesy" and "fair-play" which tended to travel together.

BBz indicated that the beginner tag was a meta tag, I approved it, and it was removed.
BBz recently indicated that strategy is a meta tag, I rejected it, it still exists.
I have no idea if I made the right decision in either case. In the latter, I decided that strategy was a useful meta tag, because it wasn't referring to a class of board games, but a class of questions. Those types of questions are certainly of interest to some people (although, the same argument has been made about the rules tag), and I know that at least I have favorited the strategy tag.
I could see beginner being useful to some players, but most of those questions came down to strategy questions. The remaining questions were merged into the teaching tag.

So are you suggesting use of the teaching tag for what I described (as my idea for use of) the beginner tag? If that's the case, I can add the teaching tag to the bridge Q cited above.

We need to go on a meta tag hunt.  I'm on vacation now, but this will e a worthy quest when I get back.

The beginner tag (or something like it) serves well in the following scenario:
I have just learned a game and played it a couple times (or in the case of a complex game like Bridge I've played it for less than 100 total hours). I'd like a guide to:

basic strategy
how to go about learning it and mastering ever more complex strategies

I am already finding Board and Card Games useful for finding such guidance, but it is haphazardly organized. Looking at all questions on Settlers of Catan is an inefficient way to select questions that are appropriate. Selecting Settlers/strategy is of some help but there are some advanced and beginner advice mixed together. What I want is to pick out Settlers/Beginners and read all of them. This accelerates my learning.
Conversely, some people may want to skip over beginner type questions, and having this tag allows such questions to be excluded from view.
This site is in its infancy. Assuming it continues to grow, what is now merely tedious (picking out beginner questions to Settlers of Catan and reading them all, or routinely ignoring beginner questions) will become impossible at higher volumes.

Thanks for opening this discussion!
It's also been hard for me to draw the line for beginner and, especially, strategy.
Beginner
It's pretty clear to me that beginner is a meta tag and largely unnecessary. I can see most information that is useful to new players also being useful to casual or veteran players, even if it's just a reference.
But what convinces me that beginner isn't useful, is that it only has 1 follower. So hardly anyone noticed that I removed the tags
Strategy
This is a really tough one and deserves it's own meta question.
For one thing, it's a meta tag and in general, I don't see that the tag helps users understand a question more than a well-phrase question would.
I tried to remove tags on questions where I was confident that the question alone could explain that it was a question on strategy, (and not rules). I also purposefully left the tag on a question that was only about strategy, independent of any game (I can't find the link right now).
But it has 15 followers! Clearly some people find it useful.
Nevertheless, its Follower-to-Question ratio of 0.0789 (15 followers for 190 questions) is still very low for being the 3rd most popular tag.
So I think it's not useful for most people because it implies that a user is either 1) interested in learning about any strategies from any game, or 2) knowledgable about any strategies from any game. I'm willing to support this rare case because then strategy wouldn't be a meta tag.
EDIT: After some thought, I wouldn't encourage its use in that rare case either because a question about strategy in general, regardless of the gamem may be too general to answer on B&CG. But I wouldn't remove the tag if the question generated an exceptionally insightful answer.

As for the strategy tag, I take it that this tag is just attractive to users, even thought they will end up not being interested in most of the questions it is featured in. There is much more value in tags of intrinsic value like "dominion" or "bridge". Thus I would tend to replace it despite the 15 followers - especially with the low relative ratio you mentioned.

Tags are useful for more than just followers! Presumably most regulars of this site aren't beginners at most board games and might not want to follow the beginner tag, yet being able to easily search for those questions could still be useful.

Though I see that they're definitely meta-tags, which are discouraged.


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Community ads for other sites, 2015 edition!
Could some artistic people put together some quality community ads to put on other sites?
I'd recommend
Sci-Fi Community Ads
Roleplaying Community ads
and
Gaming/Arqade Community Ads
So what do people think? Can we do this?

Absolutely do advertise on RPG.SE! We'd welcome it.

I'm sure everyone agrees that someone should do this ... someone else, preferably ...

@EricWilson Pitch Stone ideas and I'll see what I can come up with


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Is it 'bad form' to source content from other people's answers?
I've just had some of my answer poached by a user here. This is what the source of the post now reads:
Unfortunately you are not allowed to mix-and-match with units from different Codices any which way.  The different books are tuned somewhat to have different strengths and weaknesses.  What's acceptable in 'normal' play is of course up to the people you play with!  If it's something fun and flavourful, most people will probably allow it.  If you pick and choose the best unit in each slot from each Codex, don't expect anyone will allow it.

However, as of the publication of the 6th edition rulebook in July 2012 an army may have an 'Ally Detachment' containing a limited number of selections from another codex.  An army based on one the Space Marine Codex can include these others as allies:

**Battle Brothers:**

 - [Black Templars][2]
 - [Blood Angels][2]
 - [Dark Angels][3]
 - [Space Wolves][4]

**Allies of Convenience**

 - [Grey Knights][5]

  [1]: http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Black_Templars
  [2]: http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Blood_angels
  [3]: http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Dark_Angels
  [4]: http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Space_Wolves
  [5]: http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Grey_Knight

Of course you can paint your models any way you like and have a mix of units from different 'Chapters' as long as the actual rules in use form a legal army.

Editing in content from comments:
There has in the past been a ruling in the Grand Tournament FAQs that if you use an 'official' paint scheme, the army must use the corresponding Codex or the 'vanilla' Codex: Space Marines.  e.g., no Red Marines with blood drops on their shoulders "counting-as" Black Templars.  But red marines with blood drops counting as plain old vanilla codex marines are ok.

Edit: adding content provided by purefeet so that the answer accepted by OP is up to date

You can see where part of my answer has been copy-pasted wholesale, the citations floating part way down the answer.
Had I wanted to merely update the accepted answer I could have done so. This whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Is this acceptable behaviour?

It doesn't bother me so much when people "steal" my answers. It does bother me when they steal answers and don't bother to upvote mine. I'm sorry, but if it was good enough to incorporate into your own answer, it clearly meets upvote criteria of "This answer is useful". It's not so much that the rep matters as the principle of the thing, ya know?

This is quite a complicated gray area. There have been a few previous discussions on the subject of answer reproduction/incorporation (see the references at the end). In fact, way back in 2009, I even asked this question myself.
The broad consensus is that, in general, this kind of behaviour is positive, if done in a respectful way:

Legally, the CC license under which your contributions are made allows reuse, as long as attribution is provided.
In terms of etiquette, clearly explaining that an answer makes use of another, and giving full credit to the source is usually sufficient. Both answers will probably accrue votes.
There is value to having a single, up-to-date answer which collates all aspects of the problem, and presents it in a consistent way.
However, ripping off other people's answers wholesale and presenting them as your own is not ok.
Stealing content from other people within the first few minutes of a post, when answers are jostling for position, is not acceptable, but unfortunately often hard to prove.

In this particular example, the new content has arisen because of the introduction of 6th ed Warhammer rules. It's reasonable for the top answer to be revisited to deal with that. The author did cite you, but in my opinion could have made it much clearer that he was quoting you verbatim. After your edit, I think this answer is fine.
In terms of sportsmanship, consider also that there is a badge specifically for upvoting good competing answers. So objectively, if you think the other answer has good content - vote it up!
References

Handling answers that build heavily on (or are copied outright from) existing answer
What to do when people take your arguments and use them in their answers?
Blatant plagiarism of my answer on a bounty question
What to do when someone copies your answer verbatim?
Is it okay to copy-paste answers from other questions?
What's the appropriate etiquette when two people correctly answer a question at the same time?
How to deal with answers exactly copied from other SO answers
Etiquette: When is it ok to edit your answer to include information from someone else's?

This was a really excellent response, and I think it covered all the important parts. :)

I apologize for spelling your name incorrectly, thank you for fixing the original post.
The purpose of the site is to provide correct answers.  When the question already has an accepted answer that becomes out of date, it is important and does improve the quality of the site for future googlers that the accepted answer contain up to date content.  The likelihood that the OP is going to come back and change the accepted answer is extremely low, so the accepted answer should be made correct.

I agree in the purpose of the site, and I don't begrudge your for reflecting that in your original edit, however it's the way in which you did it that rubbed me up the wrong way.  It felt that you'd been more concerned with quickly grabbing my content + formatting and inserting it into your answer than citing correctly. I would also counter I've definitely seen an OP come back and change the accepted answer before, so I don't see that as an excuse.... but I'm more than happy though with your answer as it is. Enjoy my +1 :)

There isn't anything special about an accepted answer - remember that accepting an answer is optional (mods and the system will never force acceptance) and that other answers can still be voted up even after another answer has been accepted. If the accepted answer is also the best answer, and a few changes are all that's needed to make it up-to-date, then I think it's fine to make them. If there's a more comprehensive answer that needs those changes, edit that one, and if the changes are significant, there's nothing wrong with making a new answer yourself.

Copying is fine, lack of attribution is not. Copying is specifically allowed by the CC license as others have pointed out. Affe adding your correction to the accepted answer does improve the Internet, because now the accepted answer includes the correct information.
Your post reminded me that I had an answer that was poached (my answer was linked, but also not attributed), so I have gone back to correct the oversight. At the time I was slightly miffed (I was too focused on perceived loss of reputation points), but realized that stealing other people's work is what great people do.
What does protection mean?
What does protection from [quality] do?
I have taken this opportunity to generalize the question, correct a small error in AlexP's answer, and hopefully the questions can be consolidated to reduce the need of having two identical answers to the same question (this could be 4 questions with the same answer if we aren't careful).

I've merged the questions, in the future feel free to "flag" for moderator attention in case of a suspected dupe.  The earlier we catch 'em the better.  Thanks for everything!

I've done this before, but when I realised how badly recieved it can be, I removed the text I'd copied, linked to the answer and correctly spelled the attributee's name when I cited them. I also putthe name and link in the main body, not just at the end
Just copy pasting someone elses answer without altering it or improving on it is no better than copying from some other CC licensed sources like wikipedia without summarising or improving on them.
As the user in question took >50% of my answer, and copied it without any alteration, and made my answer essentially redundant, I would consider this bad form regardless of anyone getting rep either way.

Yes, it is acceptable, provided that proper attribution is given.
What to do when people take your arguments and use them in their answers?
Remember, we're here to provide the best information possible.  Don't get too hung up about reputation, things like this end up having very little impact in the grand scheme.

I'm less concerned about reputation, than I am that a negligable amount of effort was made to integrate my text it into the answer. If they had done, they would have improved on it, but in my opinion they didn't. From your link: Pekka commented on your question, unless the text is verbatim off your answer, you can't be certain the poster didn't come up with the content themselves (and even if it is verbatim, this can be coincidence, in particular for short code samples and widely used phrases). I don't think that's the case here.

Is his answer better because he incorporated your information?  If so, great, mission accomplished.  You've helped someone, and the internet is a better place.

Is his answer better? Yes. Is the sum of answer quality improved? No. Then the internet is not a better place.


text:
Community ads for other sites!
Could some artistic people put together some quality community ads to put on other sites?
I'd recommend
Sci-Fi Community Ads
Roleplaying Community ads
and
Gaming/Arqade Community Ads
So what do people think? Can we do this?

Just remember that community ads on other sites must be relevant to their audience! In this case, I think the audiences there would find BCG of interest, but it's worth keeping in mind. :) When in doubt, pop into the site chatroom and ask.

I actually came here looking for an ad to put on [rpg.se] .. so if you guys have something...

@Tritium21 nope not while we're in beta....

@Pureferret why wouldn't there be advertising in beta?  The only other stack advertised on [RPG.se] is [worldbuilding.se] which is also beta... it helps the beta stacks.  I am confused.

@Tritium21 OH! Put ad ON. Got you. Well Yes you can make one for BGSE, and put it else where. Also, please do so for the more up to date post.

That looks like it's just a cropped image of the Small World: River World board, with the site logo on top of it. It is not appropriate to use a copyrighted image for an advertisement like this.

Boards are copyrighted?

@cazc_941 Creative artworks, such as those features on a board game's board, are copyrighted.

Looks like it needs attribution. I can edit that in when I get home from work, I guess.  https://boardgamegeek.com/image/3157891/small-world-river-world


text:
Should "where should I sell" questions be allowed?
I've already seen the answer for "Where to buy" questions and http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/.
They both say we shouldn't allow those questions.  According to the blog, it is also in the Super Users FAQ.
Does the same apply to "where should I sell" questions?  The situation isn't identical, and isn't necessarily always as subjective.
Here's such a question:

Where can I sell my Magic: The Gathering cards?


text:
Should Elder Sign: Omens (iPad app) be tagged differently Elder Sign (board game)?
Elder Sign is a board game.
Elder Sign: Omens is an iOS app based on the board game, but with some distinct differences.
I would argue that the differences are significant enough that the two games should not be grouped under the same tag. Seeing this question which has the tag elder-sign on it, the same tag used for questions about the board game, was what originally prompted my question about the differences, since I was curious whether or not it was actually an exact copy.
It seems that it is not an exact copy, based on the answer I've received as well as the small amount I've played the iOS game, which I purchased after asking the question.
It also raises the question of whether or not questions about the app belong here, or on Gaming.SE.

see also: http://meta.boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/34/should-questions-purely-about-online-versions-of-a-game-be-allowed

Since Omens is a distinct game with it's own title and it's own unique rules, a game which is designed and played only on digital devices (a "video game", as it were), it does not really belong on this site.  This isn't so much a computer implementation of a physical game as it is a new game derived from the original; just because the original it is based on is on-topic does not automatically make the derived work on-topic as well.
Any questions should somehow tie back to the actual physical board-game version to be relevant to this site, at which point the existing elder-sign is sufficient (possibly with online or computers tacked on).  If the question is only applicable to Omens and not the board game itself, then it should go to Gaming.SE.
Creating a new tag exclusively for a video game seems needless, and goes against the core philosophy of this site.

+1 Here here. Either this computer implementation is close enough that the boardgame & computer tag are sufficient, or it isn't close enough and doesn't belong on BG.SE.

I think the best solution for these types of questions is just to use the computers tag in addition to the board game in question.

Since this is a game with distinct rules, but based on the board game, why wouldn't we just use a different tag like elder-sign-omens? It's no different than a tag like dominion-seaside which is about that particular expansion of Dominion, or magic-online which is about the online version of Magic the Gathering.


text:
Asking and answering multiple questions in the same post
Inspired by the question found here: Three beginner clarifications about Cribbage
The three questions put forward in the above post are not individually problematic; they each are, or have the makings of, clear and objectively answerable questions.  However, the issue lies in the fact that all three are posted in the same "question".
From the perspective of someone seeking answers in the future, going through the cribbage tag and finding a post labeled "Three beginner clarifications about Cribbage" wouldn't really help me.  Whereas three distinct and individually titled questions would be of more use to me for knowing whether that answer deals with whatever issue has come up, or whether I can just ignore it.
Also it would increase the number of questions and answers on the site.  Just saying.
I believe the general practice across StackExchange sites is to discourage such posts unless the included questions are clearly and tightly related.  If the questions are distinct and related only by their tags, they should probably be closed and re-posted as separate questions.
Is there yet any policy for dealing with this situation here?

This is an interesting question. It's true that the questions, being only tangentially related, should have been asked separately. And it's certainly true it won't be much help from a searching perspective in future. From that point of view, a vote to close seems appropriate. But it's also true that the question asker is new to the site, and can't be expected to know much about our Q&A system. Closing their question sends a strong signal, and can be perceived quite negatively.
If the OP shows willing to re-ask the questions, then that's fine. But for the community, there's no straightforward way to split his question, short of re-asking on his behalf.
So, for new users, I'm basically on the fence. I'm not going to take any action, since as a moderator, my vote to close would be binding. I think leaving a comment, as Pat did, was an excellent step. If the community really dislikes it, they can vote to close. At the end of the day, the OP got their answer, and may stick around. I think if we don't see any response from the OP, then closing this in a few days seems reasonable.
For reference, your question prompted me to ask a variant of this on the main meta: What do we do with "multiple question" questions?

Is actually answering the question sending a mixed signal to the user in this case?  Holding off on an answer would motivate the user to actually split and re-post; he has no reason to fix a question that's obviously succeeded at getting a good response.

On the other hand, if we don't close the question and explain how they should be asked, it becomes more difficult in the future to explain to other users why they should have one issue per question. It's true that the closing process leaves something to be desired with respect to how it looks from a new user's perspective, but I think it's still important to guide them toward expected behavior on the site. (It would also help if there were a magic tool mods could use to split the OP's question into three under the OP's name, but you'd have to split answers too, I think.)

@goldPseudo - yes, probably. But the tendency to answer is strong, and can't be managed by policy - by design, no one can stop someone else posting a useful answer.

Expanding on my comment to ire's answer, I think the best time to get a new user accustomed to how things work is on their first post: just like mods will convert a non-answer into a comment or remove it entirely as appropriate, I think it's best to close a question like this one and explain how they need to be asked.
For one thing, it'll get them accustomed to closing and opening ... eventually most of us will have a question closed, and it's good to get new users to understand what it means (i.e. closing means "paused" rather than "FAIL").
For another, it avoids the appearance (or the actual process) of having two sets of rules, one for new users and one for established users. Leaving a question open that would be closed for another user might simply be postponing the discussion of "why was my question closed?"
The OP's point here about usefulness of the title is a good one as well. I don't think we want to compile a single question that covers all of the basics of cribbage; if we're going to have separate questions for each part of the game, it might be better to split up questions like this one now.
The fact that we'd get three new questions instead of one is a nice side effect ... and while closing it temporarily may give new users pause, keep in mind that if we get them to split up their question, assuming they show research effort and are useful, suddenly that new user is getting three times the upvotes!

Ok, but bear in mind the perhaps more likely outcome to immediate closing will be no new questions from that user. Maybe we're fine with that. Also note that we aren't ignoring the education aspect - I think leaving a comment encouraging the question to be split is essential.

Also note that I am not saying we don't close the question. I'm just saying allowing a grace period may be reasonable. In fact, if diamond mods don't act, then there is a built in grace period, since it needs 5 community members to close. Since the question is ultimately shut, I don't see a problem with explaining the rationale to future users.

Yes, that's a consequence I grudgingly accept ... barring a change in the SE-wide closing process, closing a new user's question is going to look like "Sorry, you failed, go away." And I think we're in agreement with respect to what a mod should do in a case like this: as you point out, your vote is binding, and I note that there is also only one close vote, mine, and one upvote, so there doesn't appear to be any sort of consensus yet.


text:
Some autocard names don't execute correctly
[mtg:Grafdigger's Cage] fails to find any cards (Try it: Grafdigger's Cage). I've double-checked it a few times. I think it's something about the ' in the card name.
(This is very minor) [mtg:Sun Titan] takes you a search page with Sun Titan and Sundering Titan. (Try it: Sun Titan)
I'm not sure whether these are bugs on our part or limitations in the Gatherer interface we're using.
See this question for how this came up.

possible duplicate of Can the Magic card auto link feature be improved?

I'm voting to close this as a duplicate of our more recent request on the matter.

@doppelgreener As the original poster, I'm fine with that. Especially since the other question calls out exactly how to fix it. Plz close as dupe, everyone.

VTC as duplicate of the newer thread, in which this was resolved.

My best guesses from messing with Gatherer:

[mtg:Grafdigger's Cage] seems to be an issue with Gatherer itself, but it can be worked around on our side by stripping the link text -- basically kill any text between the ' and the next whitespace, so you submit "Grafdigger Cage" to the search script.
Circeus has an answer about what to do with [mtg:Sun Titan].

It looks like you can fix the apostrophe issue by just replacing %27 with %20 in the autocard links (and leave any floating characters just the way they are).
E.g. http://www.wizards.com/magic/autocard.asp?name=[Liliana%20s%20Specter]

You'll notice similar problems on the Daily Magic website itself whenever apostrophes are involved. I believe it's something to do with either escaping or straight vs. curled apostrophes.
Edit: If it weren't for the authocard, it would be relatively easy to fix. Sun Titan returns
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?name=+[sun]+[titan]

If it were
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?name=+[sun titan]

there would be no problem.

Playing around with the autocard api, it doesn't look like we can fix this.
I'm forced to status-declined as the problem is on Wizards end, and I doubt they'll be addressing it.  Every time we contact them we don't really get anywhere.

It's their bug, but it seems like we can work around it while still respecting their terms and conditions. E.g. change http://www.wizards.com/magic/autocard.asp?name=Grafdigger%27s%20Cage to http://www.wizards.com/magic/autocard.asp?name=[Grafdigger%20Cage]

I ran into this today and it was particularly frustrating. To further to cause of getting this fixed, I compiled a list of all cards with an apostrophe or ampersand, with their appropriate multiverse-id, in the following pastebin: http://pastebin.com/5P6WbPiY Perhaps you could put those in a handy map and, if you get a match on them, link directly to the card instead of to the search page (assuming this isn't against their terms of service).  Merry Christmas! :)

It can easily be fixed using s/'/ /g

Later down the road we found it wasn't so much a problem with the API, but us using the wrong part of the API. We're closing this as a dupe of the newer question which has the details in an answer.


text:
Who is deleting my comments?
Recently I commented on (an answer to?) this question. I said something like "more research and less asking" was in order, AFAIK.
Elsewhere in the SE network, I have seen comment deletion stir up quite a bit of dissent.
I contribute to online communities for many reasons. In the case of bg.se, my involvement comes from my love of board games. I play multiple games throughout the day (iOS/BSW/isotropic), and participate in semiweekly ("European") game nights.
All that to say, I don't like having any of my contribution deleted, much less without a word to me or any notification.
Thoughts?

That's a pretty rude comment.  It likely got flagged and deleted by a moderator.

@bwarner: Would it be less rude to downvote and cite the reason (which pops up for a downvote) "Doesn't show research effort ?

Absolutely.  Downvoting is entirely appropriate for a question you don't think showed good research.  Commenting along with the downvote is optional, but if you do it, try to focus on how the asker could improve the question, rather than telling them not to ask it.  http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5280/embrace-the-non-googlers

If I had mod powers, I would've deleted it (or at least moved it, if that's a thing) for no reason other than because the comment was posted to the answer, despite clearly being directed at the question and questioner.

@goldPsuedo - by design. I have my reasons for posting it where I did, as you clearly have reasons for thinking it should have been on the OP

I deleted a comment on that question recently due to it being non-constructive criticism.
I delete comments all the time, some are flagged, most are not.  It is part of the duties of moderation.  The goal is to focus the site on awesome answers to great questions. People should not have to read and understand a bunch of comments to get to the meat of the answer.  This is the primary difference between SE and forums in my mind.
Comments are ephemeral on this (indeed all) SE sites.  You should have no expectation of them lasting forevermore.  This has been stated quite clearly by Jeff Atwood, founder of StackExchange:

not every user-generated byte committed to memory is sacred. Particularly in comments, which are meant to be lightweight and ephemeral. If you want to post content more likely to survive, do it in an answer.. this is 100% [status-bydesign]... – Jeff Atwood♦ Feb 12 '10 at 21:43

Also see Robert Cartaino's response (Director of Community Development)

Comments are designed to be second class.

And from Shog9 (Community Coordinator)

Comments are - at best - second-class citizens on SE sites. The primary goal is to generate a repository of good questions and helpful answers, not lengthy back-and-forth discussions.

In general, I'll let comments live for 30 days.  After that they are prone to get considered for deletion when I see them.  If there is useful content in them that contributes to the question/answer, I'll leave them or roll them in (ideally this is an ongoing process).
Update in response to comments
Note that I used, "In general" and "considered for deletion"  Despite comments to the contrary, I do not blanket delete all comments.  I feel that the vast majority of deleted comments any reasonable person would agree are not useful.  Examples "+1 I agree" or my favorite: "Did you mean XX?"/"Yes"/"You should edit that in"/"Thanks, I just did"/"Great". My deleted comment count can really climb when I see one of those!
Moderator is a weighty title, in reality, Janitor fits better.  I spent a lot of time editing or removing comments/answers/questions from the site that I feel most people would not find useful.
Will some people consider some deleted comments useful?  Sure, I am a semi-sentient bag of water and other people may have a different subjective opinion on various matters.
Since the original poster is not defending the deleted comment in question, I'd rather debate openly any other example of a deleted comment that someone feels was really adding to the discussion.

Thanks for the answer. I'll have to disagree (obviously!) about how constructive my comments are, and mention that I have considered the possibilities and found a comment to be the best approach. I prefer not to downvote without commenting (and that question deserved a downvote based on the lack of research effort demonstrated/claimed at the time). There is certainly a more constructive approach.

Comments here often contain useful additional details or examples that would be excessive in the main answer. So I think they're not so much ephemera as... marginalia?

@AlexP - useful comments should be edited into the question or answer that they are attached to within a reasonable period of time.

I agree with @AlexP. I generally see three types of comments (with some overlap). The first type is some minor criticism or request for clarification to help refine an answer and make it better. The second type is  a more negative criticism, explaining a downvote or why an answer isn't correct or appropriate. The third type are basically footnotes: additional information that is in concordance with an answer but not distinct enough to warrant another answer.

@PatLudwig I disagree with that approach. Meta StackOverflow: "Generally, there is very little reason to delete existing comments from a question or an answer. There are a few possible scenarios where comments ought to be deleted, but it is worth noting that these should be few and far between, due to their permanent effect on the flow of the comment section."

@PatLudwig Marginalia can be useful. Or not. Depending on what you're looking for. I think of comments like footnotes. Do you want some extra, perhaps ancillary info? Read the comments! But if you don't, that info stays out of the way.

@Pat: "Useful comments..." - what?!? No! Is there any evidence that others feel this way? It sounds just like the preference of a power-hungry moderator.

@TheChaz It's not necessary to attribute "power hunger" or any other ulterior motives to Pat's reasoning. I certainly don't believe that. I understand your frustration, but I think you've crossed the line again in your comment.

Here's an example: Alice posts an MTG rules answer; Bob comments asking for clarification based on older rules knowledge; Alice gives Bob some extra details about the Sixth Edition and M10 rules changes in the comments. Folding this into the actual answer may be valuable, but it might just as easily balloon a three-paragraph answer into a five-paragraph answer with two paragraphs of stuff that's only relevant to some but not many players. I think that's more of a case-by-case thing than just saying "edit the comments into the answer" implies.

@ghoppe: Fair enough, but -for the sake of argument- please don't attribute emotions (e.g. frustration) to me. I intend to bring to light a destructive practice, and I believe that some speculation is appropriate for what will ultimately be a constructive process (of changing our policy on comment deletion).

@AlexP - see my original text, "considered for deletion"

@ghoppe - That section is old IMHO.  I'll see if I can get it reviewed and updated.  (OR I'm wrong) :)

@TheChaz Hey, it's easy to attribute emotions to your comments when you use emotional words like power-hungry and — not just an interrobang — but an interrobang with an extra question mark! ;)

@ghoppe - Got some pointers to other evidence of comments being not so important, also was no dissent (from folks currently active in the moderators room) that the faq section you pointed to is out of date.  It was noted that the section there was written in 2008 by a deleted user.

@PatLudwig Aha! I think I follow what you're saying... you don't want to remove everything old. Just consider whether it ought to be removed as part of some light housekeeping. I can get behind that.

@AlexP - I would say light to moderate, but otherwise, yes.

For fear of having this deleted if left as a comment, I submit my commentary as an answer...
Pat's philosophy on comments is diametrically opposed to the practice that I have seen on Math.SE, where I visit regularly. I know I wasn't around for the moderator (s)election process, so I must have missed the part about arbitrary unilateral deletion of comments as "part of the duties." like I said in the question, you might want to reconsider this.
Comments are not ephemeral (ie "lasting a short time") in all SE sites. I would say that the burden of proof is on this claim rather than its negation, as I have noted many interesting comments in my surfing to the top SE sites. And talk about a subjective concept! Nothing lasts, so why not scorch it all?? I think my comments generally have value (of course, I feel that my voice is worth hearing). There may be an occasional drunken rant, but I usually qualify it and/or apologize later (see meta.math.se a few days ago...)!
Sure, it's a Q&A site, but don't fall into elitism. Some further interaction is necessary beyond a one-question format.

All told, my experience here has been rather off-putting. Sure that might not mean much if you just consider me as a reputation number or IP address - but I am a human, a man, a gamer, and all those silly things that I wrote on my profile.
You guys can pretend like we're all robots if you want. I'll continue to do my thing and you can continue to delete on a whim. Who knows - maybe you'll catch the attention of a superuser!
Or maybe we could have an online tournament for commenting rights... :D

I agree that comments should not be treated as ephemeral, and should only be deleted if they are spammy, about an edit that has already been rolled into the question (ie. obsolete), or just noise. That said, I also agree that your comment deserved deletion. It would have been better just to down vote the question, commenting something like "Bad question. Do more research." isn't constructive.

@ghoppe: I get that the original comment wasn't constructive, and do not defend it. What is more important to me is Pat's deplorable stance on comment deletion (which I suspected to be present in whoever deleted my comment, incidentally).

As an active but still relatively new user, I really like the way Pat does comment deletion. The comments usually last for weeks, and then disappear when I wouldn't care about them anymore anyway. Some comments remain - and I tend to agree with Pat's editorial decisions. The result? When I read an old question and decided to read the comments on the Q or the A, they tend to mostly be comments that add value for me. New Q and A still have all the comments which takes more time to wade through but is useful for gradually improving the Qs and the As.

On those rare occasions where Pat doesn't like something I do, he has been polite and clear in explaining his reasons. This is a contrast to what you see on more free for all sites like reddit where negativity abounds, and discovering what is considered acceptable can seem both harsh and arbitrary. Overall, I feel the tone here is positive and welcoming, but focused on creating high quality Q&A. Reasonable comment management is part of what's making this happen for me.

This address the reasoning behind why you may have asked this question.

B&CG Culture
I actually find the different cultures between SE sites a wonderfully natural aspect.
From my impression of your question, in math.SE comments are valuable.
From my experience in Arqade (Gaming.SE), they would have edited this question title to be
"more on topic", closed this question as "too localized," downvoted it half a dozen times, and "purged" (yes, we use that term) all the old discussion comments if the question was thoroughly renovated and ready for reopening. Did I gasp the first time I witnessed this? Yes. But the process works for generating good content, and the moderators are aware, and trying to fix, how much it scares new users.
The SE experience does vary greatly from site to site; it's like traveling to a foreign country. It can take a while to adjust.
Moderation Style
I associate a moderator with a curator. A curator has the responsibility, and the emotional investment, to create an experience for the audience. But the experience can be enjoyable (hopefully), shocking, depressing or purposefully unemotional. That's because the gallery exhibit is also an artwork and the curator is the artist.
Thankfully, if I disagree with the curators, SE gives me an opportunity to curate.
Emotions
The is simultaneously the most important and the least important aspect of the question and the OP's answer. The Chaz, I understand that you're a warrior and lover and that is almost synonymous with chivalry and the pursuit of truth and justice and other things I only understand through stereotypes. Emotions flow from your questions and answers.
But when I come to an SE site, I'm hoping to approach a cool fountain of knowledge, in the calm shade of a clean user-interface. I'm just looking for a sip of information. And if I can enter and leave with my thirst quenched and my composure undistracted, then I would feel that the groundskeeper has performed to merit and deserves my applause.


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Should I ask a new UNO question, and if so, how should it be worded?
I already provided an answer to this question How can I do better than chance in UNO?, but after looking into the question more deeply, I don't like the wording of the question for a couple of reasons:

most important strategies for improving odds of winning: doesn't define how to measure important. (I.e. is it more important to implement a strategy that is more difficult to implement (color & rank counting), but has a greater effect on your win percentage (color counting). How should we rank strategies, only considering there effectiveness on winning?

I would like to know how effective a strategy is on win percentages. I thought my own answer to the question gave some correct advice on how to increase your win percentage in UNO, but I couldn't quantify it without experimental verification. This is what lead me to Stephen Davies UNO Simulator.

A Java simulator program (provided) can simulate thousands of consecutive Uno! games in seconds. It implements all the rules of the standard game, including the scoring, with only one thing missing: pluggable strategy methods for each player. Students have two weeks to formulate their strategies and write their code for choosing a (legal) card to play from a hand, and choosing which color to "call" if they play a wild.

I decided to actually try implementing some different strategies too determine how effective they were. I tried call random color, color I have, color I have most of, color with most points, and play strategies with similar algorithms versus each other and the dominant strategy included in the software package rbrown4 (a card counting algorithm, with some card weighting based upon hand sizes. I found that there was little difference between the card counter and just playing a random playable card, and calling a color you actually have (less than 5% in a 3-player game), but I also discovered some issues with the simulator.

Random isn't random enough: A proper pseudo random number generator (PRNG) needs a period larger than the possible game states.
The rules weren't implemented correctly: The simulator tracks points won per hand, not wins from acquiring 500 points. Draw cards played when going out don't add those drawn cards to your point total when you go out. Starting card effects are not allowed. Draw-4 wilds are allowed to be played when you have a playable color (and no "caught"/bluff is implemented)
The game state doesn't track the most useful variables: I would like to track cards played by a player, how close they are to 500 points, what colors/ranks they have drawn on, etc. but the current implementation leaves much of this information inaccessible.

I have corrected most of these issues and rerun the simulator with improved results. Previously when playing random cards and calling random colors would only result in a difference of about 10% points versus a card counter/most color strategy, the win percentage increased by 30% in a 3-player game (versus 2 random players).
Should I ask a new question focused exclusively on how effective each strategy is? (or should I edit the original question to clarify what is meant by most important strategy?)
If I ask a new question, how should I word it? - I am interested to see how effective strategies like always change a called color are, but can that strategy be singled out in a vacuum? (I.e. should its effectiveness on win percentage be measured against a random player, or a most color player, etc.) Should I wait until I correct the errors in the UNO simulation and publish the results to SourceForge (or somewhere else)

Good question. This is so in-depth that it's almost out of the scope of B&CG: most of us aren't programmers and won't be able to defend our answers statistically in a rigorous way. The last question you asked about computation in a board game didn't collect any real answers, so I would expect a similar question that demanded simulation to similarly collect no real answers except your own.

You should ask a new question: you want some extremely specific and rigorously-evaluated strategies, rather than the existing question's request for "help me lose less." The existence of a give-me-some-good-tips question does not mean that a give-me-an-objectively-best-strategy question is a duplicate.
The title of the new question should focus on how precise you want things to be, something along the lines of "What specific strategy has the highest win-rate in Uno?" The question body should highlight exactly the points you're mentioning here: you want the strategy to be objectively evaluated, not just "I lost less often doing this." Unfortunately, since we're (largely) not programmers here, you probably won't get many bites.
Update: Some wording that you might find useful:
Title: What specific strategies have the highest win-rate in Uno?
Question body: In light of (link to the "give me tips" Uno question), I'm trying to work out the best possible specific Uno strategy.  Someone has build an Uno simulator (link), and I want to create several different strategies and have them play against each other to see what works best. (Optional: add your bit about fixing the simulator. Keep it short, because that's not the important part about this question.)
So: what is your Uno strategy? Be specific: I'm going to write a program to execute your strategy, and have it play against other strategies.
Things to think about in your answer:

What card do you play next? Do you try to get down to one color or number, or always keep as much variety as possible in your hand? If you have a pair of 0's and a 9, do you play the 9 to reduce your point count, or play a 0 to keep up some variety in your hand? Do you play Skip, Reverse, Draw Two, Wild, and Wild Draw Four early or late, or does it depend on how many cards other people have?
What do you do if you must change color, but you have multiple options on what to change to? Do you think about what opponents might have, or just go for what's most advantageous to you?
Does your strategy change if someone is very close to winning the entire match, i.e. somebody's close to 500 points? How close to 500 do they have to be for you to change how you play?
Does your strategy change if you're losing the hand? How do you decide if you're losing? (Do you start ditching the high-point cards like Wild and Draw Two?)
Do you ever challenge someone's use of Wild Draw Four, by demanding they show that they don't have any cards of the current color? When do you challenge?

Don't worry about answering all of those questions, but if you change your play depending on circumstances around the table, please mention it in your answer. Being precise helps me program a strategy that matches what you do, but if some of it is a "gut feel," just give me a general idea of what helps you make of your mind.
Don't worry about having the absolute best answer. I will program your strategy, and edit your answer to show its actual win-rate against other strategies. Verifying your win-rate is my job, so you don't need to conclusively prove that you're the best: just write up the strategy you like, and I'll prove whether it works.

I was hoping to somehow encourage people to post strategies that I could convert to their equivalent java functions. I wonder how I could encourage that so non programmers can contribute.

Come out and say it! Since answerers don't have to rigorously prove their theories, they might be more willing to answer. Then, once you've made the code, edit their answers to note the win-rate.

I appreciate the edit with examples, and will likely borrow the majority of it. I will get to asking the question soon (ping me if I haven't for being lazy), but was working out exactly how many iterations of the simulation I have to run to be confident of the results). I haven't quite figured that out yet, but it is looking like I need to run 50k hands (about 1 min) at least 200 times to get the spread (2.5th-97.5th percentile) of how accurate the win rates are. 1mil takes 90min.


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What are the steps in eliminating recommendation questions?
In the immediate aftermath to this discussion, there seems to be somewhat of a consensus to ban game recommendation questions. An enthusiastic new moderator (congratulations, btw!) has done quite a bit of recommendation-related re-tagging. What I'm wondering is essentially what I can do to help the mods clean.
Clearly we will be strongly discouraging future recommendation questions. What is to be done with the ones currently out? Should they be closed / locked? If I find an old recommendation question not tagged as such (e.g. this one) should I add a recommendations tag, or flag it, or vote to close, or just ignore it?

We (your new moderators) have been discussing this quite a bit. As you noticed, I went through and removed the recommendations tag from those questions where it was being used incorrectly.
Please do go ahead and add the recommendations tag to any old question you find which needs it.
Since we haven't heard any compelling argument here on meta in favour of these questions, and we believe they are actively harmful, we plan to close the existing recommendation questions quite soon. We'll be insta-closing future game recommendation questions of the form "what is a good game for x?".  The FAQ will also be modified to reflect this.
However, remember that it's still possible to ask about the properties of games in a way that is acceptable! For example, the question Good games for playing in a pool, could be rewritten like this:

What properties would a board game need to be successfully played in a swimming pool?

A good answer might talk about lamination, problems with wind, counters etc. It would be perfectly acceptable to mention games as examples to back up these general points.
Game recommendations and other opinion-based discussions are also ideal fodder for the general B&CG chatroom, so we do still have a place where we can find out about cool new games.


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Can we get mtg-autocard support for inside code blocks?
Code blocks are often used on the site for the fixed-width indentation the provide. This answer attempted to use a mtg-autocard link inside the code block, but it didn't link. Would it be possible to enable the autocard link inside code blocks? (Or is there already a way to do it?)

I'll look into it, but I'm not sure this is fixable. The main purpose of a code block aside from formatting is that it ignores all other formatting characters (which is also why **bolding** and *italicizing* don't work in a code block). I'm not sure if it's possible to make an exception, but I'll poke around.

The workaround here is not to use code blocks for the indented list. If you use   to force non-code-formatted text to indent, Markdown will not start the count over.
Here's an example. This text:
1. **Albert** casts [mtg:Ancestral Recall]. [mtg:Ancestral Recall] Goes onto the stack.
  2. **Albert** wants to do nothing and implicitly (by sitting there doing nothing) passes priority
  3. **Nancy** gains priority and responds with [mtg:Counterspell]
    4. **Nancy** gains priority and implicitly passes by doing nothing.
    5. **Albert gains priority** and, looking smug, says "In response" and slaps his own [mtg:Counterspell] onto the table. Poor **Nancy**!

looks like:

Albert casts Ancestral Recall. Ancestral Recall Goes onto the stack.
  2. Albert wants to do nothing and implicitly (by sitting there doing nothing) passes priority
  3. Nancy gains priority and responds with Counterspell
    4. Nancy gains priority and implicitly passes by doing nothing.
    5. Albert gains priority and, looking smug, says "In response" and slaps his own Counterspell onto the table. Poor Nancy!

Thanks, Abby! I applied your formatting to the answer in question.

I feel like that's a formatting issue: that stuff does need to be arranged hierarchically neatly, but it shouldn't be in a code block. It's just that the list auto-formatter (which resets numbering with indentation) is getting in the way of how Rawrgamming wants to show the stack using indentation for the separate levels.


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Penny Arcade tag rename?
We've had two questions about Penny Arcade the Game: Gamers vs. Evil (1) (2), and both have caused confusion with Penny Arcade: The Card Game for which we've received no questions. I set about to rename the [penny-arcade-the-game] tag to [penny-arcade-gamers-vs-evil], but that's 2 characters too long for a tag name. So I decided to ask a meta question about a trivial little thing that is causing confusion. [penny-arcade-gamers-v-evil] is so close (1 character too long), anyone else have any bright ideas?

Insofar as both games are clearly labelled "Penny Arcade: The Game" and "Penny Arcade: The Card Game" on the boxes themselves, I would lean toward using the current penny-arcade-the-game tag, with the tag wiki explaining that The Card Game is a different game and would have a different tag (presumably penny-arcade-card-game).  I think the confusion lies more in the fact that most users don't actually know there's more than one Penny Arcade card game out there (I definitely didn't), rather than deficiencies in the tag itself; the fact that they're both card games, and that they're both generically named, doesn't help.
The tag is just a short and quick identifying category.  Clearing up potential confusion is what the tag wiki (and the body of the question itself) is for.
Note that the expansion to The Game is called "Penny Arcade: The Game - Rumble in R'lyeh".  Any "Gamers vs Evil" tag would thus only really make sense for the base game, but not the game series itself (think dominion vs dominion-intrigue etc.)

How about penny-arcade-gamers-evil ?


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What to do when a new user leaves a comment as an answer?
A new user apparently wanted to comment on an answer (link), but didn't have enough rep so just submitted it as another answer. I'd like give the user a warmer welcome than flagging the non-answer for deletion, can it somehow be migrated into a comment while maintaining their ownership or something like that?


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Is this an "unclear" question?
Full written card lists for sets MTG
I think this falls under unclear question. On the surface, it's perfectly clear what OP is asking for, but looking at the guide at
https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask
I believe that the question does not fulfill several of the requirements. It doesn't appear to have been researched, it is not specific in that there is no context what OP wants to do with that list, and it is unlikely to be relevant for future visitors because while an answerer could give a relevant google search term, a quick survey only seems to contain text lists with mana costs, card text, and everything else OP excluded.

You left this comment on the question:

You should describe your actual problem, not part of how you want to solve it. [...]

I would reword this slightly, because I appreciate seeing the author's attempted progress through a larger problem:

Describe your actual problem in addition to the current problem you are trying to solve. [...]

This type of problem is referred to as an XY Problem. Not all XY problems are bad. The primary frustration with them is that the solution the author asked for may not be the solution they really need. In my opinion, this question is clear and unambiguous, and I doubt the author could give anyone a hard time for answering it as currently stated.
You listed some specific concerns with the question that I think are legitimate but don't necessarily warrant a close vote:

"The question does not appear to have been researched."

Lack of research effort, especially when the author could reasonably be expected to know what to look for, is a good reason to downvote a question. It is not a good reason to close a question. Two specific sites have "General Reference" as a close reason, but a) this is not a general reference question and b) we are not one of those sites.

"The question is not specific in that there is no context what OP wants to do with that list."

The question itself is quite clear. The author's motivation for asking is unclear. Leave a comment encouraging the author to describe the broader problem (you already did this).

"The question is unlikely to be relevant for future visitors because while an answerer could give a relevant google search term, a quick survey only seems to contain text lists with mana costs, card text, and everything else OP excluded."

It is the answerer's responsibility, as well as the editing community's responsibility, to future-proof an answer. When someone asks a question for which no answer could reasonably be expected to be future proof, then we can complain about the question.

One thing I would like to add to this: the apparent lack of research may be a consequence of the asker not knowing the right search terms to use. Based on my own attempts, the word "checklist" as suggested in the question's comments appears to be critical for finding card lists without images.


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How often should a certain term in a question/answer be linkified?
I edited this question, adding the usual links and auto-links to Gatherer. I opted to link each unique card only once, Wikipedia-style, to not overload the text and distract the readers with multiple identical links. Compared to Wikipedia, SE typically has short texts, so missing out on links because of long subsections is very unlikely. Shortly after my edit, all other occurences of mentioned cards have also been linked, which I disagree with for the above reasons.
Do we have a style policy regarding multiple identical links on BCG, and if so, what does it look like?

I suppose this is meant to address not only "do we have a policy...?" but also what that policy should be, assuming it doesn't already exist. Right?

@DavidZ See the title of the question, which is not the same as the question in the body of the post. I assume the OP wants that question answered as well.

Well yeah. Do we have a policy on that, and if we do, what does it look like?

There is a de facto convention to link a card just once, mentioned for example here, which was also edited into the mtg tag wiki after that was posted.

Your edit did more than just add links - you fixed other issues with the post.
I cannot say the same of the next edit. I would love to hear why two high reputation users approved an edit that adds redundant links and nothing else. How does that improve the post? I think you did the right thing by rejecting that edit.
Now, to actually answer your question, I searched around on meta, and I could not find a policy. Then, I searched around on Google, and could not find a best practice from a user experience standpoint. I went with the third option: find a similar site and see how they do it. I checked Wikipedia, and found their style to be extremely inconsistent. Fortunately for us, Wikipedia has a style guide for underlinking and overlinking. Here's an excerpt:

Generally, a link should appear only once in an article, but if helpful for readers, a link may be repeated in infoboxes, tables, image captions, footnotes, hatnotes, and at the first occurrence after the lead. [...] However, in glossaries, which are primarily referred to for encyclopedic entries on specific terms rather than read from top to bottom like a regular article, it is usually desirable to repeat links (including to other terms in the glossary) that were not already linked in the same entry (see Template:Glossary link).
Duplicate linking in lists is permissible if it significantly aids the reader. This is most often the case when the list is presenting information that could just as aptly be formatted in a table, and is expected to be parsed for particular bits of data, not read from top to bottom. If the list is normal article prose that happens to be formatted as a list, treat it as normal article prose.

I think we should adopt Wikipedia's policy. Our rule of thumb should be to link once unless adding a redundant link would significantly aid the reader.

I think there are a couple of quick points that will let us deal with these easy.

If the post already has duplicate links, don't edit them out unless other edits to improve the post are also being made.
If the post is being edited to include duplicate links and no other significant edits are being made the edit should be rejected/rolled back.

In the long run I don't think it will be helpful to edit posts just to remove the duplicate links but if we edit them out while fixing other issues and work to prevent them from being edited in it will keep the numbers better.

I don't think we need a policy on how often a link is included in a question or answer. That sounds like overregulation (which IMO is awfully common on Wikipedia).
What should be prevented is unnecessary edits, like the one you're pointing out.
If someone edited the question in its current form, just to remove the duplicate links, that would be as bad as the edit that added them.
But since the question was only a few hours old, and this SE tends to get maybe a handful of questions a day, cosmetic changes like this are relatively harmless. I didn't give it much thought when approving the edit, it didn't occur to me that anyone would disagree with adding a few mtg tags.


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Is this "biggest flop" question on-topic?
I came across this question:
What was the largest flop in board game history?
This question is answerable, but it doesn't really seem to solve anyone's problems. It's a chatty question that, while answerable, doesn't seem to belong here.
Is this question on-topic?

Could you be vaguer? ;) Surely if you care enough to raise this, you must have some idea of why you think this is off-topic? Can you elaborate?

@ire_and_curses: I fixed the vagueness.

Forget on/off topicness.  The question is Not Constructive.

Oh.  When I saw the title I thought it was a question about poker. :-)  (And wondered whether this was a question about bet sizes or what...)

The question is about games, so I don't see any argument that can be made that it is off-topic.
Is it a real question that deals with an actual problem someone is facing?  That might be debatable.
Is it a clear and useful question?  In my opinion, no.  The term "flop" is never defined, it just gives some vague comparisons from a different genre.  It basically seems to translate to "What game didn't live up to it's expectations the most?"  That seems exceedingly vague to me, and even if there was a clear canonical example, it doesn't seem like knowing that example is going to provide any use to me as a gamer.  If you feel the same, the appropriate response is a downvote, not a close vote.

I have edited the question to better define "flop." I am looking for profit and loss numbers. The point with the video game examples was to show that examples of video game flops exist (although they may not be flops in the financial.sense), but no real flops are well known in the boardgame industries history.

The question doesn't seem "off topic." If I were to close it, the reason would be "too localized." There is a REAL difference. A question closed as "off topic" will cost the asker a downvote (two reputation points), whereas "too localized" doesn't carry such a penalty. Nor does "not constructive." Are there "degrees of badness" in close reasons?
Who (on this site) would benefit from the answers? A game designer (including potentially yours truly). Also, someone who viewed board and card games as potential "collector's items" might have an interest in avoiding a "flop."
Based on this, my own feeling is that the question is NOT "too localized," but I wouldn't quarrel with someone who though the other way. I would disagree with someone who thought that it was "off topic."