Now that activity on the recent discussion has died down, the moderation team has decided to move forward with the strict enforcement of requirements for any font identification questions. Since there was no unanimous consensus, we felt this was the best compromise between the opposing viewpoints of "let them stay" and "nuke them all".
The new requirements
To avoid ambiguity and confusion, we aimed for these requirements to be as clear cut and objective as possible. A question should be immediately recognizable as formatted properly or needs to be corrected.
A font identification question must have the following:
- Screenshot of the font
- Descriptive title
- Detail of where the font is from
- List of methods already used for identification
They must not:
- Request more than a single font per question
They should (helpful, but not mandatory):
- Be properly tagged
- Use SE's image uploaded (no external hot-linking)
Any question that does not meet these requirements should be closed immediately. Our FAQ has been updated to reflect this information and provide more detail.
How this is different from before
Previously, we never really closed font identification questions for not meeting our standards. Since there was no incentive for new users to improve their posts (or perhaps a lack of understanding the format), our suggestion was often ignored. The new rules are no longer just guidelines, they will be strictly enforced requirements. To help with the moderation, we have activated a custom close reason.
But we already used our three custom close reasons!
After discussing with the Stack Exchange community team the potential to give us a fourth, they suggested we try and incorporate it into an existing close reason. Due to the similarity, we found it appropriate to fuse it with the critique reason. Conveniently, this was also our least used reason:
Here is the new close reason (active now!):
Your question appears to be incomplete. More detail is needed for relevant and focused answers to be provided for these types of questions. Please review our font identification or critique requirements and provide the missing details, so that your question can be answered.
What to do with existing low quality questions
Many of the existing font identification questions are not going to conform to our new standards. We do not expect all these questions to be edited and salvaged. Nor do we expect anyone to trudge through all in a clean up effort. If you do stumble across one, feel free flag it for closure under the new close reason.
Answer quality
There was some discussion about answer quality. A meta post for tips on how to craft a well written answer would be great and could be linked within a comment to encourage better answers. However, since answers do not have the same mechanics as questions, we cannot strictly enforce guidelines. An answer can't be put "on hold" to give the user a chance to improve it. Flat out deleting an answer is not a good user experience either, as the user is not notified that their answer was deleted.
Reminder: our rules are never set in stone
As the site evolves, we adapt. If this ends up being an ineffective solution to the problem, we can always revisit our plan of attack and make any necessary changes. This is the general direction we are going to take for now, but we are still open to suggestions. Feel free to post your thoughts as an answer to this post.
Thanks, everyone!
In closing, we must say that it was tremendous to see how passionate you all were about doing what's best for our site. It truly reinforces that we are a community moderated site.
