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I went to ask How do you get the Custom Game Novice achievement in Starcraft 2? and I got the following message:

The question you're asking is likely to be closed.

I feel coming from Stack Overflow that this is a valid question for Gaming Stack Exchange. It has one specific answer and is not subjective and I want an answer. Why is this warning being triggered?

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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The following is the list of words that trigger the warning. All you need is to just have any of them in your question title. I don't think it's changed since this was posted, at least.

  • Best
  • Worst
  • Hardest
  • You
  • Your
  • Favorite
  • Favourite

In your situation, the best method to fix it is to just swap out "You" with "I". As in, "How do I get the Custom [...]". The you/I trip up is probably the most common in non-subjective questions, and the one that's easiest to fix.

It's not exactly the most elegant of methods but that's how it is.

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    Note that this is only necessary to avoid the warning. As Arda notes, it really is nothing more than a scary banner produced by a mechanical interface. Closing is done by people, and we're generally a lot better at interpreting these things than machines are.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Aug 3, 2010 at 20:02
  • Would be a lot nicer if it used some kind of classifier (like a Naive Bayes) to classify questions that have actually been closed...
    – user56
    Aug 4, 2010 at 19:53
  • "How do you get" should not be changed to "How do I get" but to "How to get" ;)
    – alexanderpas
    Aug 5, 2010 at 23:02
  • "How to get the Custom [...]" is a sentence fragment that lacks a subject, @alex.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Aug 6, 2010 at 2:36
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There's nobody but the developers of Stack Exchange who can properly answer that question, but the short answer is that there's an algorithm that looks for certain words and classifies it as 'potentially subjective'. I don't know the algorithm and I've had a lot of false positives as well. It just means: "be careful", not "don't ask this".

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    Why triggers it for me.
    – C. Ross
    Aug 3, 2010 at 19:26
  • As does 'Is it'
    – Robotnik Mod
    Jul 6, 2013 at 8:23

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