Be more friendly!

Question

Yes, a game-research question should contain a picture or something..

I had remembered a Demo was on a CD that is dated A to B in Magazine X and the genre as well as setting. So I asked my case. I had managed to wittle it down to about 6 years of the magazine when I asked, I knew the title of the magazine and that it was in it for sure. That's 72 items. The genre (historical strategy) and setting (asia) in combination only have three releases known to Wikipedia in that timeframe. Two of them did decidedly not match the description and indeed I could find the exact CD that had this demo on Archive.org - as well as 2 disks that somehow ended with me and list it as contents.

YES, I should not have asked without a picture or such, but that's not the thing:

Nobody commented, pointed to the relevant rule and nobody is listed as having voted to close.

THAT is not how good behavior on the stack looks like. You should be FRIENDLY. You should tell people how to improve questions. You should HELP in a way that a question can be answered!

Oh, and on top? I get scolded in chat. So I request the following feature:

Add 250% more niceness to this community!

Answer 1

Game Identification is a tricky category of question. In most cases, the question cannot be improved to become on-topic, even if an answer is found and an artifact is retroactively provided. The best thing we can do in the vast majority of cases is point people to places that do accept these sorts of questions.

I agree with you that a comment with a suggestion of alternate forums to find an answer earlier in the process would have been helpful, but ultimately your question is not on-topic, and if you still needed an answer you may find an answer via one of the resources provided in the Game Identification Wiki.

Answer 2

We have a Code of Conduct that spells out kindness, collaboration and mutual respect as the core tenants. If anyone is being rude, the best thing to do is disengage from the conversation, and flag the comment or post so the mod team can take the appropriate actions.

A lack of comments doesn't mean we're being unfriendly

Having no-one leave a comment should not be taken as a sign of unkindness or even unwillingness to help. 5 community members reviewed your question, and the outcome is that the question is not a great fit for our site. But rather than blindly delete the post and be of no help whatsoever - help was provided, in the form of the description in the blue box:

See our Game Identification wiki for more info and for help with your search.

That close reason was written/refined by the community, for two primary reasons:

1. To impart the best advice our community can give you - either to clarify your question and help you get it reopened and answered, or to forward you to places that can help you better than we can.
2. To act as a 'macro' for our regular community members, so they don't need to type the same comments again and again and again and again (getting frustrated in the process!).

In fact, when the moderators asked the community what their primary concerns/issues/wants were - improving the close reasons to help more people was the top-voted result.

Providing help

On the Game Identification Wiki, we have this section:

What if you need help finding a game that you remember?

Just because we don't think the questions are a good fit for us doesn't mean we don't want to help!

The advice below may help you gather information useful in your search. Once you have all the information you can muster up, try asking at one of these communities and sites, that take game identification questions based on memory.

Sometimes, the best way we can help is by closing your question - to show why it's a wrong fit for our site, to prompt you to improve it or add additional information, or to give other places you can try which are better suited to help you.

We also try to make this information as prominent as we can, before a question gets asked:

• It's on the Tag description when choosing the tag:
  
• It's in the help center's What topics can I ask about here? page, under the section 'Please note, however, that site policies prohibit questions of the following types: ':

  • Requests for game identification based on personal recollection alone. Read here for more information on the close reason, and read here for some helpful tips on how to identify a game when we can't help.

• In our community faq here on Meta: What are the requirements for asking a game identification question?
• And, as previously mentioned, on the Game Identification Tag Wiki too.

The users who closed

Note that seeing who closed a question is a privilege available at higher reputation point levels, but at the end of the day, who voted to close isn't as important as why the question was closed in the first place. We focus on the content, not the person who wrote it or the people who interacted with it.

If you're after their usernames so you can ask for more info around a closure, well, that's why this site exists: Arqade Meta allows us to go into more detail as to how one might improve a question, or why it might be a bad fit for us. The close voters are welcome, but not required to explain why they voted a certain way.

"Just give me an answer"

You should HELP in a way that a question can be answered!

We're not in the business of feeding Help Vampires. To be clear - we always strive to provide answers to questions - but there are some questions that just aren't a good fit for us. In those cases, the best 'answer' we can give you is that you should refine your question or ask it somewhere else.

Answer 3

Closing a question is not and should not be taken as an insult. Voting to close is merely saying that the question does not adhere to guidelines or has been asked before.

Take, for example, a question being marked as a duplicate. When something is marked as a duplicate (assuming it was fair) it allows the asker and any readers to be quickly redirected with a link at the top to another question with answers that will solve it. This is not an insult, but a way of helping everyone out.

This closing is merely saying “this is off-topic”. Reading it tells you exactly why and gives you relevant links. While someone can if they want to, no one should be required to write-up their own comment, as it will show anyway in that box.

So basically, treat that as a comment from the system - no one needs to “be nice” because there is nothing else to say, unless that person chooses.