We asked whether you wanted to try something new, and the votes say yes.

So, starting today, and running until January 2017, we're going to do things a little differently in regards to duplicate questions.

The broad rule is: Do not close questions as duplicates if the target question does not help the new asker.

What that specifically means is a little bit of a gray area. This site has had gray areas in the past, when we first started out and wanted to figure out what we were all about. We spent that time trying to make this site the best it could be by ironing out the gray areas with more specific rules to cover edge cases.

So that's what we're going to do again.

Please, however, do participate in good faith. Our goal here is to make the new rule the best it can be. If even at its best it still puts us in a bad place, we'll know that as a result of our experiment and fall back to our old ways come the review.

But from now until January, do not argue about whether you think this rule works or not at its core. We're going to try it out, and we're going to see how it plays out practically instead of arguing about it theoretically. It may fail spectacularly, or it may be a great help to new users, or it may mostly go unnoticed. Time will tell. We will have that discussion about how it played out in January.

Instead, make meta posts trying to make this rule the best it can be. We don't want to sacrifice quality content; indeed, this rule's goal is to try to bring more quality content to the site by allowing questions that may not have been allowed, and thus allowing answers to those questions. Clarify the rule, bend the rule if there's a clear fault case, mold the rule so that it fits in with our overall site. But, until January and our final discussion, do not break the rule.

Let's see if we can make Arqade even better.