Should we replace one of our close reasons with modded Minecraft tech support?

Question

The idea of a close reason specifically for modded Minecraft tech support has come up time and time and time again. Since we have recently revisited the wording for off-topic Minecraft questions, now is a good time to tackle this problem one (hopefully) final time.

As I've mentioned in reply to the most recent Meta question on the subject, we only have four close reason slots available for use. If we want a new reason for modded Minecraft, we'll have to replace one of the existing close reasons: "recommendations", "unreleased or illegal", "game identification", or "game design or development".

Users with at least 10k reputation can check various close stats on this page, but in short, these are the least used close reasons over the past 90 days:

• Unreleased or illegal: 0.58% of total
• Game design and development: 1.35% of total
• Game identification: 2.03% of total
• Recommendations: 3.47% of total

And for comparison:

• Modded Minecraft (from my counting): 12.74% of total

As such, we're looking for a consensus on two issues:

First, which close reason we want to replace, if any.
Second, what the wording of the new close reason should be. Keep in mind that close reasons can be at most 400 characters long, including link syntax.

Answer 1

I would choose to replace the "unreleased or illegal" close vote reason.

• It's the close reason that used the least

• It's easy to identify - Unreleased game questions are obvious and are usually off-topic for other reasons such as this question. Illegal game questions are also easy to identify as they usually have something about 'connecting to multiplayer' or 'the files didn't download correctly'.

• Putting a comment about how we don't support unreleased or illegal games isn't that hard and if you want to go the extra mile, you can link our rules page. Just a comment will be enough for all users to get the idea that those questions are off topic.

• The occurrence difference is over 12%, that alone should be reason enough to change it out. The issues that come up more often should be at the top of the list, it just makes sense to do it.

• This is the exact reason for the "Meta off-topic repository" idea that we have come up with. We can fully support all types of modded Minecraft servers and versions and whatever else and have a link in the close reason for the user to get their issue fixed. There could be a ton of really great answers to the most popular issues that come up.

• For those that ask a modded Minecraft question, it's a great opportunity for new users to go into our Meta section and make it better by posting an answer to the "repository" of answers. If you get the users involved, they will stay longer and contribute more.

Answer 2

Which close reason, if any, do we want to replace?

Game identification: 2.03% of total and Recommendations: 3.47% of total

I think it would be relatively simple to put these off topic reasons together, asking for a game that is about 10 years old where you play as a goat could either be game identification, or a recommendation, depending on the rest of the question. They are fairly similar and would probably work well together. We could rename this new close reason to Game identification and Recommendations.

Questions asking for recommendations of games, servers, software, or hardware, or to identify these based solely on memory are off topic. If you have a picture, video, audio file, or other medium to point to, we can help identifiying the game. See our Game Identification Wiki, our curated list of external resources, or "Q&A is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!" for more info and help.

Game design and development: 1.35% of total

This makes sense as an "official" off topic reason, I don't think that we can combine it with any of the other three off topic reasons in a way that makes sense. I'm not completely sure what kind of questions we usually get for this, but it may be possible to close these question as off topic, because they belong on another site in the Stack Exchange network instead.

Unreleased or illegal: 0.58% of total:

Edit: We could replace this off topic reason due to the low rate of usage and some other things.

This is an important close reason in my opinion. It should not be removed, even though it isn't used much. This would basically show that we do not want to help with illegal activities. _{I personally don't consider questions about unreleased games to be quite as bad. It might make more sense to combine questions about unreleased games with the "Game design and development" off topic reason.}

This should stay as it's own close reason

What should the wording of the new close reason be?

We have a highly specific rule that singles out a single game.

I believe that this is, in general, the most common complaint about this reason to close a question. _{I may be wrong, but it's certainly an important problem.}

The problem is not that these questions are about minecraft, the problem is the general lack of quality and the difficulty to troubleshoot the problem, if it's even possible to recreate it. We will have similar problems for any other popular game that is highly moddable.

I would suggest that we change the wording to "non vanilla versions of highly moddable games" instead of "modded minecraft". This would mostly affect minecraft, but it wouldn't single out one game, it would be a general rule that would account for all questions that would suffer from the same problems.

I basically think that we should have "Troubleshooting and diagnosis of non vanilla versions of highly moddable games, including crashes, startup errors or other abnormal behaviour caused by modding" as the reason why we close a given question.

This would work well as an off topic reason:

Questions that ask for troubleshooting and diagnosis of non vanilla versions of highly moddable games, including crashes, startup errors or other abnormal behaviour caused by modding are off topic.

It would also work as a custom close reason:

I'm voting to close this question as off topic because it is about troubleshooting and diagnosis of a non vanilla version of a highly moddable game, including crashes, startup errors or other abnormal behaviour caused by modding.

Summary

If we decide to add it to the off topic reasons, then combining game recommendations and identification may be a good way to do this. Alternatively it may be possible to remove "Game design and development" from the off topic list, but I consider this alternative to be worse. We wouldn't nessessarily have to add it, but it would make sense.

Edit: We can also replace the off topic reason for questions for Unreleased or illegal things.

I think that we should reword the close reason to not be about a single game, while keeping it narrow enough to only be valid for games that are likely to cause the same problems.

Answer 3

Questions seeking technical support for modded versions of Minecraft that cannot be reasonably reproduced by others are off-topic. These include crashes, errors, and undesired behavior caused by modding. We recommend first isolating the mod causing issues, then approaching that mod's community to get an answer.

The link would point to a community wiki here on meta where we explain the process of removing all mods to troubleshoot an issue, then adding several mods back in until the crash or abnormal behavior is found.

Answer 4

Would it be possible to combine "Unreleased or illegal" and "Recommendations" into one reason thus freeing up a slot for modded Minecraft?

I don't know the character limit for close reason text, but something like:

Questions that ask about unreleased or illegal content or for recommendations of games, servers, software, or hardware are off topic. For more information, see "Q&A is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!". For other places that accept requests for recommendations, see our curated list of external resources.

Perhaps the "For more information..." part may need to change a bit if we went this route.