We are discontinuing support for identification questions

Question

NOTE: While identification questions are not accepted on the site as detailed in this announcement, the community is currently reviewing this policy and how to proceed with these questions in the future. If you'd like to share your thoughts and ideas, please join the discussion: What does the community want to do with identification questions?

Just want quick help identifying a movie or TV show? Check out these helpful resources.

Since its very inception this site has struggled with the problem of identification questions and their controversial nature. Over the years these questions have become more and more of a quality and moderation issue and the community grew more and more weary of them and the work they generate as well as the bad light they throw on the site.

A recent call for input from the community on this problem has shown a rather unanimous dissatisfaction with the current situation as well as broad agreement that they are not worth the trouble anymore. The site needs to finally make a stand and come to terms with the fact that these questions, while once ago thought to be worth a try, have failed to prove their worth and manageability. The community has thus come to the decision to move forward and finally make official what has ultimately been its unofficial stance for quite some time:

We will stop supporting identification questions on this site.

But how is the site going to proceed with this newly found confidence? We very much know, that this is quite a big step in the site's development, given how prominent these questions have become over time. It will thus be approached with a gradual process in order to ease the site into this development. First and foremost, and quite obviously:

• All identification questions will from now on be off-topic on this site and the existing close-reason will be adapted accordingly (inspired by a similar close-reason on Anime & Manga):

Identification questions are off-topic, because they tend to attract low-quality and low-effort posts. The community has decided to no longer support these questions. Please refer to this meta post for additional details.

• All users are encouraged to make use of their flagging and close-voting privileges accordingly on any new identification questions. Practically this means nothing else than extending what the community already does on the majority of identification questions to all of them.

You may go and close-vote any older ID questions from before this announcement if you feel thus when stumbling across them. However, we will take care of our existing baggage of ID questions in a more automated and systematic fashion later on during this cleanup process. It might thus not be the best use of your or the rest of the community's time to flood the review queues with 50 old questions to close manually each and every day.

• The help center, the tour page, as well as the respective tag wikis will be adapted accordingly.

As to the future outlook of the overall cleanup process, the next steps will involve:

• Closing all existing questions (starting 15 days from now):

We will ask SE for help in automatically closing all existing identification questions and, for the time being, applying a historical lock to them (which makes them unvotable and uneditable by non-moderator users, as well as removing them from normal question lists).

Together with that, we will blacklist the identification tags (again with help from SE), which makes them unusable on any new or existing questions (generating an appropriate error message when trying). The tag will remain on existing questions that have it (which will be locked for editing, though), making it useful for finding those questions for any further cleanup.

• Cleaning up the existing questions (another 15 days later):

We of course also need to come up with a reasonable cleanup approach for the existing baggage of identification questions, keeping in mind various factors, like having examples for the site's development and the questions' off-topicness vs. hampering their search engine indexing that attracts new ones.

These issues will, however, be addressed in future meta posts respectively. For now the community has made the first step in finally deciding to deprecate identification questions. But feel free to share any suggestions and feedback about the overall cleanup process.

Answer 1

Just an observation; Walt was recently lauded for hitting the 100K mark here in terms of rep. Take note that 67% of his posts are in identify-this-movie and another I'm-not-really-sure-how-many are in identify-this-tv-show. Our biggest contributor just lost his biggest tags.

Actually, we voted on this in 2016 and we decided to keep them. I don't know why we needed a re-vote, but 15% of my own questions are in this tag and I'm currently #6 on the rep list. So, 2 of the top 6 users rely on this tag. Is it really that much of a bother to keep these questions? is it worth losing that much participation?

EDIT

On the right side of the screen, you should see a link for Favorite Tags. Click the Edit button and you'll see a box for Ignore tags. Add identify-this-movie to your Ignore Tags box. Problem solved.

Answer 2

I think one option we could do is create a meta post detailing the avenues/resources that our experts would follow in order to identify movies and tv shows. This way we can at least point users to a reference to help them find what they want, rather than just telling them 100% no. I think putting this in either the tag wiki or the closing reason would be beneficial.

Answer 3

Identification questions is what introduced me to this site. It is also why I got addicted to it. It is really a shame to see it go away. Especially when there is no other site that provides such service and has such powerful community. And extra especially when the community never complained about such feature.

Answer 4

Not sure if this should be an "answer" or a comment, but I think that the tags should still show up in the selectable list when someone is asking a question with a warning of not to use the tags. If the tags are just not visible, people might try to create a new tag, or just use other unrelated tags and not notice that Identification is no longer a valid question. In other words, if I make a new question, and start typing "ident..." in the tag box, I should see the existing id tags with a "do not use" warning.

Of course having a context warning when a variation of "identify" is typed into the title box would also be nice, but I'm not sure if that is a supported feature.

Answer 5

It sounds like there is enough support for a Movie/TV Trivia SE.

Seems odd to create what will essentially be a competing group, but other areas of SE have branched apart, so it's not unprecedented.

Answer 6

Very dissatisfied with the disappearance of these questions, which I loved and kept coming back for.

Would it have taken a coding wizard to send an actual email to everyone who ever interacted with an "identify this movie" question (posters, commenters, accepted answers, people who favorited or liked), and ask them to join a poll to chime in? This is how one could ideally gather significant data.

Is it present, past and future users' fault if less people come hang in the Meta than the main site to express their opinion? And since this decision is impoverishing the website, why complain about the frequentation of the Meta and then right away do something that will make the main site less visited as well?

Also, I'm sorry, but you can't just break something that works fine without giving a working alternative. Tell us where to post these questions (non-SE maybe?) and we will go ask them there. I'm happy to even migrate my questions and answers to another site, some of them were very popular and bringing value. They'll bring value someplace else.

Answer 7

Came back to Movies & TV to ask another good quality identify this movie question. Sad to see it go.
Also disappointed to see that my previous identify this movie question seems to have vanished in thin air. Were these archived anywhere? I now have 173 ghost reputation :]

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To throw some nickels at it, perhaps in the future if it's to be restored. It could be a special sub category of this site such that the ask question field requires the asker to provide, say, at least three scenes from the movie, the lesson the movie teaches or the genre.

While I was thinking about my identify question, I pondered: How could my question benefit someone other than myself? So I polished my question up with the lessons the movie teaches because with information like this it may help others looking for a good movie to watch.

As an example, here is my question:

I recalled a movie I used to watch 10-15 years ago.

I believe the lesson was that you can find a companion in the least expected places. 

It was about a group of friends who would play a sport (maybe baseball) and sometimes they would lose something over the wall. I believe the other side of the wall had a junkyard, perhaps scrap automobiles. Now, the other side of the wall had a SCARY VICIOUS dog that would chase anyone who set foot so the friends would dare each other to go over and recover their lost items.

I also remember at some point the wall had a hole in it near the bottom. Nevertheless, by the end of the movie the protagonist boy discovers the dog is actually friendly and just needed a friend this entire time. 

The makers of the movie were able to transition this fearfulness and and stress into a passionate and powerful friendship. A barrier of fear was surpassed. The most unexpected things can turn out well if you just put some passion and intention into them.

Maybe the wall was made out of tires.

Answer 8

I personally wouldn't be worried about the work these questions generate. Not every person has to answer every question. If you don't like it, don't answer it, and let someone who enjoys answering that question answer it. I think people prefer to hear crickets than an angry answer. I don't think a plethora of unanswered questions is a bad thing.

Think about it this way. You're a new member of this site. You look for questions that interest you to answer. They've all already been answered. You feel left out and/or unutilized.

Answer 9

This was the only reason for coming to this site. I check in periodically to see if this has been reversed, sadly not. I guess in another year or so I will see if the site is worth visiting again.

The quality of the non-identify questions very much put me off this site, I like questions that have actual answers and value. From the title of the majority of the questions here you can see that they are all opinion about trying to read the mind of some writer or director or someone who did not put that kind of thought into the topic in the first place it is enough of a struggle to get the talent in front of the camera in the first place much less creating some form of perfection. Actor screwed up, director or editor messed up.

I like sites that have questions that have answers, not sites that speculate on reading the minds of folks that will never see the question and give any kind of real answer or speculate on reading the minds of a fictitious character. I guess this site is about discussion rather than answerable questions. And I guess that is fine, I could participate in the answerable questions part of the site.