Mod Identification Questions

Question

I had recently posted a question about looking for a certain type of Minecraft mod. This got closed by several people and downvoted and the likes. The following question is not about the Minecraft mod question. I just wish to know how to ask a mod question in the future without it being closed.

So, in case a question about mods would need to be asked again, would an "identify this mod" format be suitable for this site? Something along the lines of roughly knowing the premises of what the mod does or how it changes gameplay and asking a question about it, based on those pieces of knowledge. I had read Let's Talk About UFO's, and I don't mean the Ask Question Mothership: and was a little unsure if a question like this would be closed or not. As a active user of this site I wouldn't let my question accumulate with all the other old, inactive "identify-this-______" questions.

P.S. Is there an identify-this-mod tag of some sort?

Answer 1

Identify this Game (ITG) questions work—albeit barely—because they're solvable riddles. The asker ostensibly knows exactly what they're looking for, they just don't know the title of the game. The bad ones provide so little detail they're nothing more than glorified game recommendation questions as people guess at anything that could meet a set of requirements outlined in the original post.

It looks like your question was deleted, but from what I remember, it wasn't an "identify this" question in the same vein as ITG questions: you were looking to add some functionality to the game and wanted to see if such a mod existed already. That puts it more in line with game recommendations, which are off-topic here.

And given how relatively easy it is to create mods, it's hard to see how any mod request would be an ITG-esque question: unless it's a huge mod that's really well known (e.g., The Aether), any number of mods could have the functionality described, there'd be no correct answer, and we're right back to the type of questions that are off-topic here.

If I may suggest an alternative: just ask how to do what you want to do, whether it requires mods or not. For example, ask "How can I limit my inventory in Minecraft?" not "Are there any mods that will limit my inventory?" or "What was that mod I'm pretending to have forgotten that limits my inventory?"

The correct answer might be something that can be done in vanilla, with mods, or something else entirely. The key is that the recommendation is not the focus of the question: solving the specific problem is, and answers can be judged not on how much people like a specific mod, but how well they solve that problem.