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As we have Locating or purchasing Movies or TV content as off-topic in https://movies.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic yet we often get these type of questions, it would be nice if the off-topic close reason reflects that as well.

I suggest adding OR where to find/see/watch them to the close reason.

Recommendation questions asking for lists of movies/TV-shows are off-topic as they don't fit our Q&A format. Feel free to ask for people's opinion in chat or take a look at this related question for general guidance on finding what you're looking for.

to

Recommendation questions asking for lists of movies/TV-shows OR where to find/see/watch them are off-topic as they don't fit our Q&A format. Feel free to ask for people's opinion in chat or take a look at this related question for general guidance on finding what you're looking for.

or

Recommendation questions asking for lists of OR where to find/see/watch movies/TV-shows are off-topic as they don't fit our Q&A format. Feel free to ask for people's opinion in chat or take a look at this related question for general guidance on finding what you're looking for.

Just to clarify the close reason.

More evidence:

~15 out of 41 "custom close as off topic questions" in the last 90 days are about locating/watching/purchasing, with various ways of writing it. And an unknown number of those 40 with generic custom reasons, or those close votes of "too broad", "primarily opinion based" or "unclear" (a bit wrong) could also be it, or any of the others (very wrong) The Recommendation close was used 20 times. Merging these into that specific close reason instead of requiring custom reasons would make tracking the number of these questions easier.

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    Yeah, I can see where you are coming from - but these are different close reasons. One is 'a Q&A format doesn't really work well with questions that could have multiple different list answers - each of which is equally valid' ... and the other is, 'where to find/see/watch content questions are off topic'
    – iandotkelly Mod
    Jul 21, 2016 at 4:27
  • @iandotkelly both are recommendations, and the other option is to use the generic close reason.
    – cde
    Jul 21, 2016 at 4:30
  • Yeah - I do see how we could 'kill two birds with one stone' here. I would be ok with changing the wording here.
    – iandotkelly Mod
    Jul 21, 2016 at 4:34
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    A good start would be to first look up what percentage of questions actually get closed as "location/purchase requests" from the close statistics.
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Jul 21, 2016 at 10:15
  • ~15 out of 41 custom closes are about locating/watching/purchasing, with various ways of writing it. And an unknown number of those 40 with generic custom reasons, or those close votes of "too broad", "primarily opinion based" or "unclear" (a bit wrong) could also be it, or any of the others (very wrong) The Recommendation close was used 20 times. Merging these into that specific close reason instead of requiring custom reasons would make tracking the number of these questions easier.
    – cde
    Jul 22, 2016 at 4:58
  • To me it's better to have new close reason rather then merging this two unrelated one.
    – Ankit Sharma Mod
    Jul 22, 2016 at 7:03
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    While it seems worthwhile to make a reason for this specific case, I have to agree with Ian that they are conceptually quite different. One is basically "primarily opinion-based" (just that this doesn't offer custom sub-reasons and we have to cram it under "off-topic") and the other is genuinely not a topic we serve, even if it would not be too unfit for the SE format. But then again, SE is really picky about allowing more than 3 custom close-reasons, so maybe it's still a good compromise.
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Jul 22, 2016 at 9:48

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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After the community seems to deem this a good idea and noone expressed their reservations in actual answers, we went through with this suggestion and adapted the close-reason accordingly.

Recommendation questions asking for movies/TV-shows or resources to locate or watch movie/TV content are off-topic. Feel free to ask for people's opinion in chat or take a look at this related question for general guidance on finding what you're looking for.

The moderators specifically had and still have a few doubts about merging two close-reasons that are technically a little different, but this solution and the wording we came up with seems a good compromise, especially in light of the difficulty of getting a 4th close-reason and the necessity for this one (as pointed out in the question) as well as the existing reasons.

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