Tool recommendations aren't off topic yet, Or: Let the community actually decide on that first, because we didn't [duplicate]

Question

A few hours ago, a tool-recommendation question was closed as off topic with the close reason we're now applying to game recommendation questions: Way to manage world factions and events. Now I see the tag has been edited to declare tool-recs off topic, and the close banner universally refers to all recommendation questions.

Consider me pretty shocked that we're now banning tool-recs as well, because there has been no dialog on that at all, nor checking with the community.

Community self-evaluation: How are we doing with game recommendations? covered just one tag and policy: whether game recommendations are on topic, represented by game-recommendation. That policy almost exclusively concerns itself with recommendations of actual RPG systems (hence our original tag being system-recommendation), and later came to be used for adventures too. We talked about that one tag and its purpose. It had loads of problems, not least of which was shifting goalposts. Tool recommendations were never asked about nor discussed.

tool-recommendation questions are something we've been handling separately. They never had much visibly to do with that policy or that tag. From what I've seen, they don't experience identical issues, and they don't get the same level of draconian rule enforcement and mod attention that was necessary to keep game-recs functioning at the minimum functioning level. More than that though: we the community never talked about banning them nor endorsed doing so. They've been banned without consultation, based on a discussion of one different type of recommendation we host. This is not good due process.

Before you go closing tool-recs for the same reason, and banning those as entirely off-topic, actually get our endorsement on this plan please. We may as a community want to keep them on topic. (Or we might choose to say they are off topic, which is fine, but let's actually have some public agreement on that first.)

Answer 1

To be very clear, this question largely exists to communicate there's been a mess-up in communication and action by the moderators over the banning.

Here's what happened:

1. "Let's evaluate how game recommendations are going because they seem pretty shaky."
   • Lots of discussion that seems specifically centered on games and adventures, i.e. the game recommendation tag's contents. Absolutely no mention of tools.
   • General agreement game recommendations aren't going well.
2. "All shopping questions are now banned."

Jumping straight to step 2 was itself pretty surprising: The policy change regarding game-rec questions needs review. It was generally agreed due process should've had an intermediate step where we discuss whether to actually carry out a ban, but also that it wasn't worth going back and having that step.

Here's how good communication and process would've happened:

1. "Hey, let's evaluate how all of our shopping questions are going. That covers game recommendations and tool recommendations and just about everything else you can think of recommendation-wise, so we're evaluating those things too."
   • Discussion happens on a variety of subjects. Tool recommendations get mentioned.
2. "Ok, evaluation's done. Do we ban recommendations of game systems, and adventures, and tools?" (Or a separate question for each.)
   • We decide and say yes/no to each.
3. "Hey, we're banning these things you agreed we should ban."

Mentioning the clear impact of things would've been good communication. Consulting us clearly on actually banning things would've been good process. Neither of those happened, and the interpretation of our game-rec discussion as being all shopping questions is not constructive.

We should probably now have a discussion on tool-recs and whether to keep or remove them, since that never happened. But the fact it didn't, but they got banned anyway, is a big problem.

Answer 2

I had a big long answer written up, but I don't really think I need one.

Let's turn back the clock and peer way, way back in time to the antediluvian period, in ancient August of that long-vanished year of 2015:

@doppelgreener If the game-recs go, then our draconian bandaid solution for them will go too, I have no doubt. Whether tool-rec and such will live on after is probably something that will take some time to shake out, but regardless they'll be managed on their own merits. – SevenSidedDie♦ - Aug 20 at 3:50

Answer 3

SevenSidedDie argues that tool-recommendation is a subset of game-recommendation, and therefore banned along with that tag. While that's certainly worth discussing, it's also important to consider tool-recommendation on its own merits. And in that arena, I believe that it falls short.

Tool recommendation questions are effectively identical to shopping questions, which are banned on SO main for good reason, as well as on most of the rest of the SE network. Unlike some questions on, for example, Super User, RPG tool recommendation questions rarely can be rewritten to the more acceptable, "Teach me what I need to know to make a good decision for myself," so even that loophole is closed.

So why are shopping tool recommendation questions bad? They, pretty much by definition, lead to link-centric answers. While a good answer won't be just a link (an explanation of why the tool matches the asker's needs is pretty much mandatory), it will still be centered around a link that could stop working at any time. A lot of RPG tools are unlicensed 3rd party contributions made available for free on whatever no-cost/low-cost hosting is available to the creator. They can disappear at the drop of a hat, and even if they're still available, they may not be kept up to date.

Essentially, tool-recommendation is the RPG.SE equivalent of class of questions that the rest of the network has banned for good reasons, reasons that apply just as well here as they did everywhere else.

Answer 4

Shopping questions are/were off topic initially.

We decided we should allow "system-recs" initially and developed guidance to attempt to allow them. As it became clear we were getting adventure-recs, tool-recs, etc. we changed the tag to game-rec and said "and tag it with adventure or tool or setting or something too."

Recently, as these questions remained both scarce and problematic, we had discussion on meta and ended up rescinding shopping questions. This includes all variants.

Apparently not everyone participated in that discussion, or had the same understanding of it, or whatever. OK, that's unfortunate. But the mod interpretation of current state is as I've stated it above. Therefore it is fact, as we're the ones that have to enforce it, and we see no clear reason we should be interpreting past discussion in a different way.

More meta Qs just saying this is unfair or improper or generally complaining about how it's all "mod abuse" and the results of impropriety - this one and @darkwanderer's other one - aren't going to help anything and frankly generally makes us want to ignore them. This will be my only post to this question and I do not intend to post to @darkwanderer's given its current frame. They're frankly patently offensive and I have better things to do than engage with people who are expressing themselves in this manner.

Proposing specific guidelines under which we might allow tool recommendations (or the "close to rec" class of "does something exist?" questions) that could be discussed and voted on would be.

However, given the failure of game-recs I'm not sure what rules would be both easy enough to administer and effective, so I'd most likely be against that measure, though perhaps I might be surprised with a brilliant plan (other than 'do what we were doing again,' which is a non-starter).

Answer 5

Tool-recs have always been a subset of game-recs: a recommendation of a game or something for a game. Having their own tag was a tagging convenience, not a sign that they weren't shopping questions subject to our now-defunct special exception. Even if someone persuasively argued that the different tags were a significant separation, they are still self-evidently shopping questions and therefore off topic.

Note that it's somewhat inaccurate to say that we banned the game-recommendation tag—we would ban question types, not tags, if we were to ban something. It's inaccurate in a different way to even say that we banned shopping questions—we just stopped making an exception for them, and watched the default network-wide ban reasserted itself. That might seem like semantics, but that's fine because this issue is tangled with semantics and it's important to understand what did and didn't happen when we the mods executed on the overwhelming agreement that our exception's rules did not work. Everything that was only permitted by that exception is again off-topic.

Since all recommendation requests are off-topic by default, if we want to host tool-recommendation questions, a new exception would have to be created. The old system did not work, and won't be restored wholesale or in part without some very persuasive arguments that it will turn out differently this time.

There's no reason we can't have a new exception, except that nothing has yet been proposed that might make them work in our format.