The policy change regarding game-rec questions needs review

Question

A recent meta post about the efficacy of game-rec questions, which had the initial tone of "How are we doing with this question type?" became a tacit vote to ban the question type.

This is problematic. Reading the question, and the first few answers does not make it clear that casting a vote of "Yes, we need to look at this type of question" (the tone of the original post), would be a vote to ban the post type. This caught me off guard, and apparently one third of the users who saw the announcement.

Answer 1

The mods were surprised by the overwhelming support for the view that "the guidelines don't work and should be abandoned" (+19/−3, and twice the score of any other feedback).

Given the steadily increasing resistance to the guidelines in practice, followed by that unexpected and overwhelming support for a late suggestion to abandon them, holding a vote-to-confirm-the-votes to revert to Stack Exchange norms would have been superfluous. (We've all known the GM who calls for multiple rolls until a preordained result is rolled—calling for votes to confirm votes has the same problem.) Even then we sat on it to see if there was a reversal coming, until it was past obvious that it was a fait accompli and was waiting only to be implemented. Or more accurately, for our peculiar policy to be recinded.

We also knew there would be objections after recinding it. That is the nature of policy changes.

Regardless: the observed problems with recommendations under that policy, and the reasons for proposing abandoning it, haven't changed. Those reasons can still be challenged, and the feedback meta is still open to answers. Unless there is a clear reversal of consensus there and attendant support for reinstating the policy, there is no reason to return to the previous status quo.

There is also nothing preventing, alternatively, a new suggestion for a policy to permit recommendations at RPG.se. What we have learned about the strengths and weaknesses of the previous policy might even give such a proposal a fighting chance at being effective.

Policy formation at SE is like that: formed organically by talking about what needs doing and coming to decisions. There isn't a formal process, just this free-form use of meta.

Answer 2

I agree this was unfortunate and inappropriate from the standpoint of jurisprudence. Nonetheless, it's not clear to me that proper procedure would have yielded a different result and the inappropriate action was neither intentionally abusive nor particularly egregious.

I propose we agree that answering with a plan for community action drawing on the other answers on a 'Community Self Evaluation' meta is in bad form. It should probably have been done as a second meta being like "Ok, we've got this data from the community self evaluation, what do we think we should do from here?" "A: all this stuff, so lets not do game-rec any more".

I understand SSD's position that holding a vote to confirm a vote is superflous. The problem is that the first vote never really happened in a nice clear unambiguous manner in the first place, and really shouldn't have been happening where it did anyways. I mean, I disagree with a lot of what he said in the meta answer, but I upvoted it anyways because I thought it was well worded and extremely relevant for the follow up discussion I figured we'd have. Luckily I realized it was turning into a 'lets decide to do this by upvoting this' post before I could no longer reverse my vote, but still.

In any case, I think trying to do anything about this specific issue other than agreeing that it was, in fact, a bit of a screw up, would be more work than it'd be worth and would likely go badly anyways. We don't have mistakes like this very often and it's unfortunate that it happened on something as important as this, but important things are always woollier so it's not entirely unexpected.

Let's hope to do better next time :)