Feature for new users asking ID this movie questions

Question

Reading this thoughtful answer to the question, "Why are we down-voting off-topic ID questions?" it occurs to me that a useful feature might be to have an automated "Community" comment address questions from users which satisfy the following conditions:

1. Question posted by a user with less than 100 reputation points
2. Question tagged with "Identify This Movie"
3. Question is issued a vote to close.

Presumably users with less than 100 reputation points are fairly new and may not have done much more than taken the tour.

Paulie_D's "canned" response seems more than adequate:

Please try to add anything that may help identification. When was it released? Was it in Color or Black & White? What time period was it showing? What country was it likely from or what language was it in? Are there any other plot details you remember? Descriptions of scenes or names of characters or actors you can give? Anything at all? Feel free to [edit] any additional details into the question. For help writing a good identification question, see: [Identify-This-X Questions].

...and at the very least it would spare him the heavy lifting!

Possible additional conditions:

• the question asker has not earned the "Informed" badge;
• the question asker has just joined on movies&tv.SE (within a week?)
• the question asker has less than 100 reputation points on movies&tv.SE and less than 100 on any other sites they are members of.
• the question asker has less than 100 reputation on other sites and less than 50 on movies&tv.SE
• the question asker has only 1 reputation point on movies&tv.SE

Presumably, the site will always attract questions from folks trying to find the name of that movie which is on the tip of their tongue. Certainly we do not want to encourage poor quality questions, however, we do want to encourage a community which encourages useful questions being asked. Automating the basic, "here's how to do it" when a vote to close is issued would also let other user's focus on editing the question so it is more intelligible (especially so when ESL users are asking) and making suggestions.

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A typical example of what I see:

Thriller set in a house near a cemetery with a chauffeur driving a pink car

Not so much as a "welcome to M&TV.SE!" and a ton of confusing edits to a bewildered first time user. As was, the original question was intelligible and answerable. Seems like the rush to insist upon a perfectly worded and formatted question is doing more harm than good.

Perhaps given some of the suggestions here, automatically commenting "identify this" tagged questions with a comment including a link to the guidelines is the way to go. (Per Paulie_D's post, this would require an html tag for the guidelines). Also, per Napolean's comment here, listing "Identifying a Movie or TV series" as the second item in the tour regarding what kind of questions to ask is "to be changed"...

Answer 1

I haven't got time to write a fully detailed response to this, but here are some thoughts.

We all know that some good detailed ID questions still get VTCs. I don't know who casts these votes, so can't verify anything, but my guess is that one or two users VTC pretty much every ID question posted on the site, no matter how much detail it has. I'd be pretty annoyed if I was a new user who went through all the checklists before posting and wrote up a really long and detailed ID question, and still got a comment nagging me to add new details just because someone VTCed it anyway.

For that matter, without any customisability on these comments, it's going to be annoying anyway. What do you do when somebody's included one detail but not another in their question? Let's say you've already specified that it was an American colour film from the early '90s in English, and then you get a comment asking you to specify the language, country, time period, and colour or B&W. Wouldn't you be a bit ticked off? Hell, I even get ticked off by seeing such comments on other people's questions - it clearly shows that the commenter hasn't even bothered to read the question before attempting to get it 'improved'.

Also, I was once told that "The one thing that causes new users to leave most often is a lack of human interaction." If a new user posts a question and gets no response except from a bot, that could even be worse than getting to response at all. At least if there are no comments on the question, a kindly user might come along and leave some feedback, which they wouldn't do if the bot had already said what needed saying about improvement to the question.

Finally, leaving comments to suggest improvements is the close-voters' job. From A Theory of Moderation, some of which applies as much to any moderation action as to diamond moderators: "Whenever possible, try to leave frequent comments on posts where you’ve taken (or considered taking) a moderator action, explaining the reasoning." If questions are regularly being closed without comment, especially when the close reason amounts to "this question needs more detail" rather than just "this is blatantly off-topic", then you may need to look at whether you've got a problem with your close-voters.

In fact, there'd be hardly anything to gain by having a bot leave such comments! In the course of setting up such a bot, you'd necessarily have to program it with a stock comment. Instead of doing that, just save the stock comment here on meta and encourage all close-voters to use it. That way, the OP would get human interaction, it would only be used where actually necessary (rather than automatically with any VTC, even invalid ones), and it could be customised as appropriate (e.g. remove any questions which the OP has already answered in their initial post).

Answer 2

In general, I think this is an interesting idea but I think how it's applied needs some adjustment. We need it to be simple to implement, so the more "rules" there are, the more complicated it is.

First off, we get a lot of people here from other sites. Having 101 rep from the association bonus doesn't make them any better able to ask a good ID question.

That being said, I don't know that there's any need for a rep minimum for this. Any user can ask a crappy ID question - even people who have been here for a while. We should hope they would know better but it's not guaranteed.

Don't forget that we also have a couple of other ID question tags, so we probably want to include those in the list of tags that this applies to:

identify-this-movie identify-this-tv-show identify-this-episode

We probably don't need it for identify-this-actor, though it might be good to have something for that one... that's another question.

I think that we can simplify the rules to only the tag and the close vote though I think it might be worth considering making it appear automatically on any [first?] question with the ID tag posted by an unregistered user, regardless of close votes. This version of it could be reworded slightly to be more of a reminder than a request:

Welcome to M&TV! Please review your question and add anything that may help identification. When was it released? Was it in color or black & white? What time period was it showing? What country was it likely from or what language was it in? Are there any other plot details you remember? Descriptions of scenes or names of characters or actors you can give? Anything at all? Feel free to [edit] any additional details into the question. For help writing a good identification question, see: [Identify-This-X Questions]. If you've already included this, great!

My reasoning here is that the sooner we can get this info to the asker, the better... and lots of these people post questions and never return. If the comment is there as soon as the question is posted, they won't have had time to wander off so they may fix their question before they leave.

None of this will catch questions asked without an ID this film tag but... there's only so much we can do. This would take a lot of the grind off of the regular users.

Answer 3

Some form of prompt is a good idea since it seems that ID questioners have rarely taken the trouble to read the Guidance.

The real shame here is that the specific ID section of the Guidance is not linkable. If it were, we could implement a direct link in the pop-up (or whatever) to the specific part of the Guidance that applies.

Just adding an HTML ID to that <h1> would enable us to link to it instead.

As it stands, for those interested in "user moderation" I recommend the Stack Exchange Auto Comments Extension/Add-on which is what I use for "canned comments". These can be edited before being posted and thus tailored to the deficiences of the individual question.

The Guidance should, I have asked before, be updated to include ID questions based solely on images (or videos).