Arqade Community Check-in 2019: A call for input

Question

Arqade, our well loved Q&A site for passionate videogamers is rapidly approaching its 9th birthday! We (and Stack Exchange as a whole) have grown a lot as a community from those heady days and - although we’re still going strong, we always strive to do better.

Firstly: Yes, we heard you. The recent election was controversial for some, and while there isn’t a lot we can do to change those minds, we mods want to put our best foot forward and get on with the job. In case you missed it, we listed some options available to community members if you take issue with anything the mods do. On top of that, moving forward, we are going to try and make every effort to be more open, welcoming and accessible to the wider community, starting with this post.

So what exactly is the purpose of this post?

We want your opinions, feedback, suggestions, annoyances, pet peeves, wishlists, bucket lists, gripes and grievances when browsing Arqade, using its features, or interacting with the community at large.

If you're not sure what to put, here's a couple of example questions to get you thinking:

• In your opinion, what are Arqade’s strengths and weaknesses?

• What are the day-to-day challenges or issues you face with Arqade? (eg. We get a lot of Minecraft tech support questions; can we introduce new users better to them?)

• What’s that ‘one thing’ you wish the site had, handled, or did differently?

• Do you have any suggestions, feature-requests, or other wishes?

• Got an idea for a tournament, contest, or other community get-together?

• Would you like a followup to an old meta/bug/feature-request?

• Can we look over a reviewed/edited/closed/deleted question for a second opinion?

• What can we do to facilitate community events or otherwise help you out?

We won’t be able to cover everything raised here in detail, but our hope is to identify the major issues, and then follow-up with dedicated metas for those issues afterwards. Plus, we know meta can be intimidating, so hopefully this meta will help to encourage folks that have otherwise been silent to weigh in.

Any other general feedback to share?

Got something constructive to say not listed above? Go ahead! This post is to take stock of the community and gauge some interest in doing more. Remember that Be nice applies here too!

Answer 1

One thing I wish we could do differently is having a more formalized way to point users who ask a question that's out of scope for the main Q&A site to a more appropriate venue. it is good that we focus on questions we can answer, and I like that we generally don't bother answering questions that are out of scope, instead closing them, but I feel it makes us less welcoming to new users who by definition aren't familiar with our stricter rules, and it also doesn't really help those users, which even though it's not really our problem does make me feel kinda awful.

Currently all we're doing is closing those answers as off-topic, but a possible idea I've been mulling over is to have a canonical "external resource repository" question here on Meta where for each off-topic reason we list a handful of resources that can be helpful in answering the issue for that particular off-topic reason. A properly moderated and maintained list like that, while probably not helping to reduce the amount of questions we get, can definitely serve to help users who ask a question we're not qualified to help. Then if someone asks an off-topic question, we just point them to that question.

Maybe a meta question is not the right place for such a list. Maybe it should go on the "what can I ask about here" help page so we can link there. Maybe it should be half a dozen separate questions on the main site so we can close as duplicates. However, I don't think we should be straight up telling these people off and pushing them away from our site. That's extremely unfriendly, to the point that "closed as off-topic" and "marked as duplicate" have been turned into multiple different memes of people in danger not getting help because "you're not the first person drowning here, so we won't help you".

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status-completed

Moderator reply: this project looks complete now. The following three FAQs are linked to in our close reasons:

• My game identification question was closed as off-topic. Where can I ask for help instead?
• My request for recommendations was closed as off-topic. Where can I ask for help instead?
• Where can I ask technical troubleshooting questions about modded Minecraft?

Answer 2

Let's take another look at the difference between Good Subjective and Bad Subjective

I'm sure we've all seen subjective questions here, and some of us have voted to close many of those. I'm talking about questions like

• What's the strongest team composition to fight the final boss?
• Which weapon should I use to clear this quest?
• What's the preferred build order when aiming to use these endgame units?

These are subjective questions, yet I would argue that they are not primarily opinion based, and in fact they are exactly the type of question that we need more of: questions that are not simply answered by a Google search, but questions that require actual game expertise.

The issue with these questions comes from their answers. With subjective questions, many users are tempted to post a short answer with the team/weapon/build that worked for them, without explaining why those choices are good, and what challenges they overcome. But then, why are questions being closed if the answers are the problem?

I propose we revisit our moderation standards for subjective questions, realize when a question is Good Subjective and leave it open, while strictly enforcing quality standards for the answers. Good answers to good subjective questions should mention the poster's experience and explain why their answer is good.

When looking at game-specific forums, it is rare to find entirely objective questions like "At what level can I learn this skill?". There are simply too many resources out there for easy, objective questions, so the majority of the discussion is based on experience. If these questions are curated properly, they can promote game discussion in a way that is appropriate for a Q&A site, filling a gap that I feel is currently present in our questions.

Answer 3

We could do more to entice people to contribute here

We (Arqade) don't do a whole lot of dedicated advertising or community building. A lot of our traffic tends to come from search engine hits, and our community is pretty broadly-scoped to encompass all games. What this means is a lot of those game-specific experts tend to drift towards more dedicated forums, subreddits, and fan-sites, because those sites give them the ability to discuss various intricacies of the game they are interested in with other like-minded experts.

So, could we do more in the way of building up our community's unique presence, and try and attract more people to join in?

Reach out to other gaming communities?

There's plenty of dedicated communities for various videogaming endeavours out there - for example, competitive gaming, speedrunners, achievement hunters, and so on. Perhaps we could reach out or partner with some of them and promote asking/answering questions here?

And this isn't necessarily restricted to the gamer-side either - what about game developers? @GameDevs - What could we do to help build up a repository of knowledge around your game? Could we be your official dedicated FAQ?

Cross-promote on Stack Exchange?

Speaking of Game Devs - We have some great SE communities that overlap on certain topics with us in different ways, in no particular order (and off the top of my head) there is:

• Game Development
• Board and Card Games
• Role Playing Games
• Sci-Fi & Fantasy
• Super User
• Retrocomputing
• Worldbuilding
• Movies & TV

So we could do some cross-promoting? I'm thinking cross-site competitions, Community Promotion Ads, Monthly 'best topics from across our related SE sites', that sort of thing.

What would you like to see done along these lines?

status-completed

Mod Note: We're starting our cross-site efforts with a competition to build Arqade community ads that will be cross-posted to other SE communities:

Let’s build some Arqade community ads - congratulate our winners!

Answer 4

I will preface this post by saying that whilst I'm active on the network, mainly SFF, I am mainly a lurker over here on Arqade. I will do some reviews from time to time and I do like to read meta but I find it hard to get properly involved and here's why...

The homepage is pretty much only Minecraft related questions and most new questions I see are of the same (currently 10 of the 15 most recent!). This isn't a problem per se as popular subjects and games are always going to get more posts. However, the amount of them drowns out anything interesting (to me) and I am left to wade through Minecraft to find something that might interest me. And this isn't helped by the recent re-tagging of a lot of Minecraft questions.

Of course I could use tag related pages to find new questions but when I do look through my watched tags there doesn't appear to be anything new at all. So then I go looking through other potentially interesting things to find that I could answer but again I am shoulder deep in Minecraft.

Now we certainly don't need to stop or slow down the amount of Minecraft questions, as long as they are on topic, but I think we need to do something to get more questions asked in different tags for different games. Look at some of the recent AAA games and they barely have any questions for them, for example, assassins-creed-odyssey only has 6 questions and that is an open world game with literally hours and hours of game play.

I imagine part of the problem here is different communities coming together for specific games and posting there instead of a general place like Arqade. And it's not helped by every other "news" website posting guides and tutorials on how to do everything in the game. But that said I still think we need to do something to attract new questions to other games, and not necessarily only AAA games but starting with the popular ones will always help and then you can move to some lesser known ones.

So what can be done? It isn't exactly an easy task to accomplish and probably worthy of its own discussion but off the top of my head:

• Run weekly/fortnightly/monthly challenges for specific games, chosen by the community, and reward certain posts with bounty rewards. Best answer, most viewed question etc. (I know you can't bounty questions but I'm sure a workaround can be made).

• In the starting days of Arqade SE itself used to run contests, I doubt that would start up again but could be worth a discussion with SE to see if it is possible. Or even if anyone is willing to start an internal contest. Heck Bricks.SE even run competitions in partnership with The LEGO Group, it might be worth trying to contact some publishers to see if Arqade could try something similar. (That would be quite a lot of work but if someone is up for it, it might be worth a try).

• Advertise on different forums and in different groups. It would obviously need to be done well to not spam and check with their rules on promotion but is a possibility. This also applies to advertising on different stacks on the network using the community ads bulletin.

• Another point that I think is quite important but can be quite hard to do is get those popular questions asked early. If a game has just come out and there's a question you can see that many might have, ask it! Even if you self answer in the end it can draw quite a lot of attention in.

  For example, see Where was Stan Lee's cameo in Deadpool 2? that I asked over on SFF the day(?) it was released because it was likely to have a lot of attention. And it had the desired effect gaining ~17k views very quickly, if I remember correctly (and I know results are tailored) it was even the top Google result for a while as I beat a lot of the "news" sites posting their articles on it.

  Speed on popular subjects is very important to get people looking and even if 0.1% of those new visitors stick around you're still gaining new users you otherwise wouldn't have and that can help the community grow. Just something that might be worth attempting though, y'know, being the FGITW isn't always easy.

Answer 5

In your opinion, what are Arqade’s strengths and weaknesses?

It's strength is the foundation of being an SE network and functioning like one. That is what drove me here in the first place. The weakness of Arqade is the vast amounts of low quality questions. There are tons of questions from young users who have spelling and grammar mistakes and people who don't read the rules.

What are the day-to-day challenges or issues you face with Arqade? (eg. We get a lot of Minecraft tech support questions; can we introduce new users better to them?)

We need to have a "tutorial" of sorts on how to ask a good question. It goes right in line with playing a video game tutorial section, and there needs to be more of a guideline on how to ask a good question. I know the counter-argument to this is that nobody reads the rules anyway, but if we can force a new user to through some sort of tutorial, it would greatly reduce the amount of low quality stuff here.

What’s that ‘one thing’ you wish the site had, handled, or did differently?

I wish we would redo the close reasons and rules for more clarity. Our rules are vague for newer users. We need to have concrete, easy to understand close reasons. We always get arguments on "too broad" being too broad of a close reason, for example.

Do you have any suggestions, feature-requests, or other wishes?

I suggest advertising The Bridge more. Getting users to stay on the site and be a part of our community would be great. Once they see Arqade as not only a Q&A SE site but as a community that talks about games, politics and life events, maybe they would contribute more around the site.

Got an idea for a tournament, contest, or other community get-together?

Arqade discord would be awesome. With the amount of people here playing games, why not have a discord to get us all together?

What can we do to facilitate community events or otherwise help you out?

I think we should do more game-related events. New games are constantly getting released, but we don't push users to post questions about them. We should "feature" games and game-tags depending on releases and updates. Something like: "Update 1.15 for Game XYZ released today - got questions? Use the Game XYZ tag today!" That's pretty cheesy but I hope you get the idea.

More thoughts

My post on the election was highly downvoted for being excited for Frank being a mod. I remember my first run-in with Frank; he came across as stern, but someone who knew a lot about the rules. I had a decision to make at that time - either leave the site or double down and learn the rules. I decided to learn to the rules and become a 20K member of the site. People keep posting on and on about SE Be Polite policy, and I think overall we do a fine job at that. When there are blatant issues, there's always a meta post about Being Polite the same day. Even I was the subject of one not too long ago.

I think we all need to keep our chins up and remember that we're doing okay. With a couple of changes, the support of a great community and an open mindset, we'll make Arqade the place we all want it to be.

Answer 6

I've been thinking a lot about what to do about bad minecraft questions, specifically minecraft-commands questions. I know that unlike the other posters in this question I'm not a super high reputation or duration user of this site (or other SE sites), but I feel like I may have one possible solution for this problem.

But first, however, I'd like to more carefully define the problem, which is that there are many low-quality minecraft-commands questions being posted, which bury and cover questions which are actually interesting. In this case, low-quality means that they reflect a general lack of understanding of many of the principles behind Minecraft command usage, and reflect a desire to just have a command written for them rather than a desire to learn why said command works.

I have been, of course, guilty of this on one or two occasions, like here, where I thought that items inside inventories could have scoreboard tags and would retain said tags when they were dropped on the ground. Of course, items are not entities and cannot be tagged, as I learned quite quickly. As you can see, I got three downvotes, two of which I accept are valid because I did not do all of the research I needed to. However, other questions, like this one, demonstrate no research effort nor effort at understanding entity selectors, which is certainly something someone should know the basics of before posting here. Of course, this question is very easy to answer (and is pseudo-free rep) for many of the people who ask and answer questions on the minecraft-commands tag, however, they are still detrimental to the overall quality of the site.

That brings us to my proposal. Given that minecraft-commands attracts a lot of new users who make an account to get a question they have about how commands work answered (for example, me when I made this account, although I was a bit more careful about what questions I put), we don't want to go around like the Knights of Question Closing closing every question that has an obvious answer, because that makes us seem unfriendly.

Instead, I'd opt for something similar to Nzall's idea above, but just for minecraft-commands: a specific community wiki which explains in layman's terms how selectors work, how nbt structure works, how to use /execute and what an executing entity and location even means, etc etc, with external links if an explanation becomes too long. I know that the Minecraft wiki covers commands, but from personal experience it is really hard to understand as a beginner, and this was after I was pretty fluent in Java. I also know that Arqade is a Q&A site, but there are a lot of bad questions and honestly this seems like a good way to solve that.

In addition (if this idea is adopted) I suggest adding a new close reason: Covered By Commands Wiki, or something similar, so that these questions don't need to be downvoted into oblivion (which makes you, a new user, feel really bad), and fits in with the above stated desire for more clear reasons for closing: it's either on the community wiki or it's not.

Thank you for considering my proposal. I have an interest in teaching so I would be willing to help write this.

Answer 7

One thing I think could really help is pushing for the question wizard to be rolled out to the Arqade, and customized for our site. People hate having their questions closed, and I think the Question Wizard would help alleviate that problem with honey pots, as we get a lot of questions that fall into a few groups.

We are already going to some pretty extreme lengths to show our policies on certain types of questions to try and help askers know what is expected of them, such as this meta on minecraft command questions, and our extremely lengthy tag wiki for game id questions. We also have questions like this minecraft error codes question which has 67 undeleted duplicates to it.

Given that a lot of our questions tend to fall into one of the following categories

• Game ID
• Minecraft command help
• Modded Minecraft support
• Minecraft errors
• Lore explanation
• Mechanic Explanation
• Strategical Advice

we could make effective honeypots to catch the ones we don't support, and direct them to better places to ask with less friction, or more effectively guide them in areas we do support.

While I realize this is something only that would require support from the company, however we are one of the older and the larger sites on the network, I think it could be extremely beneficial for the health of our site if we/the mods could possibly push for having it implemented.

Answer 8

I think there is a fine line between following/enforcing the site's rules and actually helping people. In the broader sense, the rules are there to help people. They keep content organized, tagged appropriately, cleaning out the stuff deemed off-topic, spam, etc., so obviously one can easily see how the rules lead to helping people.

But aside from the above-mentioned controversy, I think we need to re-evaluate what helping people actually means. Recently (a month? ago) I started getting back into the review queue after having been super busy with work for a couple years. I see TONS of modded Minecraft questions, most of which seem to be asked by new users, and judging on the grammar and language, I'd guess mostly relatively young users. I follow the rules and vote to close obviously off-topic questions, and knowing that I know nothing about modded minecraft (I can barely answer basic Minecraft questions because I usually only play with my daughter) I definitely cannot help, but I still feel bad for those people. They are trying to get something to work, and are failing, and we're literally just booting them right off and telling them "We won't help you."

So, in an attempt to provide some kind of assistance, I proposed a new SE site for modded Minecraft. Even though I don't necessarily think it's a great idea, I was just trying to think about how all those people we turn away can be helped, or at least find a place to ask their questions. As of now, only one person has commented, and it was a blatant "no dice" response. I understand "off-topic is off-topic" but it really feels like rules > helping. I think this mindset is what drives a lot of people to dislike the site, post the "F you I'm leaving" posts on Meta, and generally resent some of the people here.

I remember when I started on this site, and I didn't know how to properly ask a question, and I got reamed for it. Fortunately for me, I stuck with it long enough to get the hang of it and was finally able to answer some questions, gain some rep, and start contributing. I don't think that most people who have similar bad experiences hang in long enough to reach that balance, and I'd like to be able to help them somehow, without compromising the content of the site.

I see the same thing at my workplace -- some people follow process for process' sake, forgetting the actual goal or purpose the process was designed for in the first place. I think we're teetering on the edge of that here, and it makes me sad.

Answer 9

I'm disappointed to see controversy around Frank's election. Frank has been an extremely committed user of our community for many years with a keen eye for policy setting and upholding, and while we definitely haven't been agreeing on everything, I'm happy to see his passion rewarded with the position of responsibility he sought for so long. I'm sure that it will quickly dawn on everyone that, while it's fair to use behavior as a user as precedent for how one would then behave as a mod, the role of a moderator is actually quite different from that of a user, and so you shouldn't expect the exact same patterns of behaviour to continue.

There is definitely a bit of a learning curve here, so I encourage the community to be kind and patient towards Frank as he grows into his new position, while also delivering feedback directly to him when you see something objectionable.

So long as we give each other the benefit of the doubt, it's probably going to be fine. And when it doesn't, I have absolute faith in the community managers to steer things in the right direction. In years of interactions with them, they have always been spectacularly helpful and a source of great advice in how to handle thorny situations. (I should know; I've made my own share of mistakes, too.)

Looking at Frank's recent activity, I would simply encourage him not to directly close questions that are obviously off-topic* (example). Rather, simply have faith in your community to close these questions for you. Look at it from the receiving end: seeing five users work together to close your question is quite a bit different from seeing it be closed by the singular act of one moderator. The latter is more likely to get the asker upset, and an upset asker becomes more work for you.

More direct intervention is better used when handling corner cases in the community meta, where you would otherwise see a question be opened and closed several times. In that case, helping people follow the spirit of our rules to correctly extrapolate the correct outcome is precisely what you should do. Something like "we didn't have the X rule; as a result we started getting this Y kind of questions; this is specifically what is wrong with Y questions; does this particular question have the same fundamental issues that X questions do? If not, we shouldn't apply the X rule.". We've seen cases where such questions would be closed and opened and closed and opened and so on, and indeed that's not a good experience for our community; quickly driving such a discussion to its correct outcome is what a moderator should probably strive to do then. And if you can't? Oh well, to the meta we go.

This is however more of a nitpick and I have no problem believing that Frank will rise to the challenge and meet the standards of behavior that this community has come to expect of moderators.

*It's still perfectly fine and actually great fun to destroy spam accounts on sight.

Answer 10

I probably have a somewhat distorted opinion here because I haven't been active on Arqade for very long, and I'm only active in minecraft but:

Not enough effort is/was spent tagging questions

I've edited almost 400 questions, and the vast majority of those are simple things like adding the minecraft tag to a question that has a minecraft-something tag but no parent tag, or are tagged minecraft but lack the appropriate subtags. Many of these questions were asked years ago. The fact that these questions needed my attention years later indicates a failure of the community.

Not enough effort is/was spent closing questions

I don't think I can explain this better here than I did in chat yesterday

1. Some duplicate questions acquire 19 upvotes and go unclosed for four years)
2. Other duplicate questions attract 14 upvotes and go unclosed for six years.

The closure rules aren't enforced strictly enough

This question and this question are clearly about tech support for modded minecraft, which the community has ruled off-topic. Yet both of those questions have passed the close vote review queue. The failure to close questions that clearly should be closed does not send a good signal.

Answer 11

The off-topic reason for questions about tech support for modded versions of minecraft should be more clear, and more general

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status-completed

Moderator Update: A separate meta question was opened for this discussion: Update the off-topic reason for "Technical support for non-vanilla Minecraft" in the help-center. The off-topic reason was updated to be more clear in the help center.

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If a player encounters a bug and asks a question on how to work around it, is it about tech support, or about gameplay?

Is a modded version of the minecraft launcher considered to be a mod for minecraft, or the launcher?

If there is a problem, where someone can't delete a profile for a modded version of minecraft from the vanilla minecraft launcher (there are many who seem to have this problem with forge), is that a question about a mod, or the vanilla launcher?

also

I don't think that we should close questions because they ask about minecraft: we should close them because the type of question is off-topic. The main problem may be minecraft mod related questions, but we may have similar problems with different games.

What if tomorrow the game "mycraft" is released: it's similar to minecraft, but it would be a different game.
Should questions about that game be on-topic, even if they are identical to those for minecraft? Should we change the rules and introduce a new close reason, every time there is a new game with the same problem?

My suggestion

I think we should have clear rules that account for all games.
We could rephrase the close reason to something like "technical support for modded versions of games, when there is a stack trace, but no code".
If the stack trace is not provided, then the question is unclear.
If it is provided, but without the code, it would be off-topic.
If it is provided, including code, then it would likely be a question better suited for SO, or gamedev, which is also off-topic on arqade, but we would point in a direction, where the question might find an answer.

I think this would specifically target the type of questions that we try to target with the current rule.