Main help center page: Question collection and voting

Question

Coming from this question about what to put on the main help center page, the suggestion is to have a (relatively short) list with important meta questions to help introduce new (and network) users to our site and our practices. This question is for determining which questions to put on, which may include writing new Q&As specifically for that purpose.

Some notes on how this should work:

• One suggestion per answer. Make it clear what topic is covered and ideally how you'd see it worded on the list. If you are suggesting a new Q&A be created for the purpose, give a brief summary of what it should contain. Also give a brief reason for why it should be included.

• Upvote suggestions you think should be on, downvote on those you don't, and if there's unaired aspect point it out in the comments, but as there will be multiple answers I suggest we keep discussion lengths to a minimum.

• We'll not give a hard score requirement for which questions are included or not, but will use our judgement. The same goes for ordering, but we'll likely want them order by importance as indicated by votes. (Basically, if there's something that just makes more sense to put earlier, or later we'll do that).

• If there are multiple suggestions on the same topic we'll default to the highest voted one, or combine the suggestions if appropriate.

• The last item will be to our FAQ index, so no need to include that as a suggestion

On future process

There's no current plan for a continuous process once this is completed, so once this has been acted upon, further refinements should be done using a separate feature-request. If it's sufficiently minor (say I make a spelling error somewhere), just point it out to me or another mod somewhere.

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The suggestions which got sufficient support have now been added to the help center as their new Q&As. If you have new suggestions (or think one of the below should get more attention), please post it as new feature request as described above.

Answer 1

"Closed" doesn't mean "banned forever", but more like "work in progress"

"Closed" can seem rather final to users who are more used to forums, so explaining to them that it's more like a "work in progress" state and that the community can reopen any closed question might help to make it feel less final, and therefore more likely to engage and work with us to get it into a more on-topic state.

I propose we create a new meta Q&A that explains to new users what closed does and does not mean, why their question was closed, and what they can do to get it open again, if that's even necessary or desirable.

Answer 2

On specifying the game system

This might be one of the more crucial things for us to inform new users about. However, our current meta's aren't written with the asker in mind, so I propose we create a support question to cover that and how to do it (and have done so). Suggested wording on the help page:

• You need to specify which game system you are asking about. See Why do I need to specify my game system and how do I best do it?

The answer to that question would then cover the reasons why, eg. that they don't want to give a wrong answer, many games share terms so without it being explicitly stated it's hard to know, and that we have a policy to never guess the system (for these reasons). It would then explain how to do it, how to find tags, what to do when you can't find the tag, etc.

Answer 3

Answers are for answers, not comments

The flip side of answering in comments, it might be good to explain to new users why answers should answer the question and not be more like comments, addressing other answers or just providing some tangential point.

I see this a lot with new users, a lot of what comes through the Late Answers and Low Quality Posts review queues are of this nature, so having something explain why this isn't how RPG.SE works might be worth putting in place.

If we are to create a new meta Q&A for this subject, I would imagine that it would want to explain to new users the sorts of things we typically try to explain to them in comments beneath their "answers that are not answers":

• how and why RPG.SE differs from a forum and is more like a Q&A site;
• how comments in answers don't answer the question and therefore don't follow that Q&A pattern;
• how the purpose of RPG.SE is to create a library of knowledge that comment-answers don't contribute to;
• that using answers to ask new questions also breaks the Q&A model and that they should create a new "thread" for their question;
• how "me too" comment-answers don't answer the question and also break the Q&A model;
• that answers that either add to other answers or even try to argue with other answers don't make sense if those answers are deleted for any reason, or if voting changes the order of the answers so their comment-answer (which was probably written with the assumption that the answers are in a static order like in forums) doesn't make sense;
• any other reasons I've missed as to why using answers to make comments is a bad idea.

It might be that we already have a page in the help center that already explains a lot of this, but the how to answer page doesn't really contain much of the above. Maybe it's in a different help page? In which case, this new Q&A might instead want to compile that information rather than having it hidden or scattered about in obscure places in the help center.

Answer 4

We are an edit happy community

To try to avoid situations like this one, it might be worth having something here to explain how here at RPG.SE, we tend to edit posts into shape, so new users who might be rather attached to "their" post should perhaps not take it personally; it's just what we do here.

Users who are not used to such an "edit happy" culture might benefit from something explaining this, and why it's useful or desirable here at RPG.SE.

A meta Q&A written for this purpose would likely want to include an explanation of what RPG.SE is all about, that it's not just about them getting their answer now (although editing their question into shape does help them get an answer now), but that editing their question or answer into a more readable state helps future users, since we want RPG.SE to be a repository of knowledge.

Answer 5

Answer in comments

This is a problem that shows up quite often, especially when a question makes it to HNQ. Should users refrain from answers (or partial answers) in comments?

When users don't have the time or complete necessary knowledge to provide an answer, they often provide "insights" or "guidelines" as partial answers in the comments to the question.

Personally, my second most used flag is, I think, "Answer in comments" (the most used being "No longer needed").

The suggestion would be something like

Please refrain from answering in comments. The comment will be deleted shortly after. You can check Should users refrain from answers (or partial answers) in comments? for the reasons.

Answer 6

On our rules, policies and practices

Ok, this is more outside the box, but RPG.SE (and most stacks AFAIK) differ from forums in that rather than having a set list of rules to follow (or be sent into the shadow realm), we operate primarily on practices which leave a lot to user judgement. This is a hard thing to get to grips with, and usually is only really explained when you ask your first meta question trying to establish a firm rule about a certain thing (I know I did), and some of those go ugly (I'm glad mine didn't somehow).

If there is a good write-up on this anywhere on the network, no-one linked it to me as far as I can remember. Unless someone can find such a write-up I propose we create our own, and put it on the help center page. Proposed entry on that page:

• We operate much more on practices than firm rules. Try to work with and listen to experienced users as much as possible. See: What are the rules and polices of RPG.SE?

That question would cover the nature of rules and policies, and more importantly practices, why that works better, that we understand it's harder to pick up, and that we ask for patience and willingness to learn; if you're willing to learn, we are more than willing to explain to the best of our ability.

It would also list, or attempt to list our "rules" and policies, which mostly boils down to (and I welcome additions of things I've forgotten) don't post spam (+disclose any affiliation), Be Nice (and the rest of CoC which doesn't include that phrase any more), don't link to piracy, don't answer in comments, and don't guess the game system in edits or answers. It should probably also include some kind of link our set of on-topic defining policies, as those are mostly hard defines rules.

Answer 7

Don't signal your edits

If new users are more used to forums where it's common to say "EDIT: Blah blah" instead of just making the edit, it might be good to point them in this direction to explain why that's not necessary.

I don't know if it would literally just be a link to this: Don't signal your edits in text
Or whether we'd write a new one more aimed at new users, but although we can just edit their "EDIT: " out, it would be better if they could see something that explained why it's not necessary or desirable to do so here at RPG.SE, and why people keep editing it away when they do.

Answer 8

Our "Don't guess the system" policy

We revisit it often and I believe the most up-to-date meta question is this one: Re-revisiting the "don't guess the system" policy

I guess we would have to update the page yearly as we revisit the policy, but nonetheless, it is a reason questions are often closed and discussions are often started, and even edit and close/reopen wars.

We have a few meta questions that talk about "please indicate the system you are playing" and where to put such information, indicating our users want this information to be put somewhere, and a link to this Q&A should be sufficiently explanatory on why it is important to indicate the system, implying you should put it when making a question, and, more important to me, could avoid the many arguments about the policy that show up in comments now and then, as well as the edit wars mentioned previously.

The suggestion is:

If you see a question closed due to lacking the system it is playing, and the question does not explicitly mention the system anywhere in its text or title, please do not add the tag, no matter how obvious you think the system is from the question. Check our policy for explanations at Re-revisiting the "don't guess the system" policy.

Answer 9

Expect Frame Challenges

Too many metas to list: https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=frame+challenge

Sometimes people will answer by targeting what they see as the problem behind your question rather than directly addressing the question you did ask. We call that a Frame Challenge and sometimes it can be better than a direct answer. Sometimes not.

Answer 10

Encouraging users not to accept straight away

This one might be a bit more controversial, and I don't think it matters too much, but based on the accepted answer to this Q&A: Should we encourage users to wait 24 hours before accepting an answer?, it might help to encourage deeper engagement rather than hit-and-run users who we never see again.

This should probably be rewritten as a new Q&A aimed at new users, rather than using that above linked Q&A, since that answer clearly isn't written for new users, it's written for us more experienced users. This is assuming we want to include this at all, because we don't want to imply that it's a rule that users have to follow, and is just to encourage deeper engagement rather than imposing a rule on them.

Answer 11

Our "Don't guess the system" policy, but easier to maintain

This is similar to my other answer, but the suggestion is done in an easier way to maintain.

If you see a question closed due to not specifying the game system, but you think the game system can be added with the information provided in the question, see how to proceed at Re-revisiting the "don't guess the system" policy.

The idea here is to make the text flexible to a changing policy, which may or may not get loosened.