It's time to start revising all of our community specific close reasons to follow the new community specific close reason format. This new format greatly increases the usability of community specific close reasons, giving a far greater level of customization. The new format allows us to give better guidance to the askers of closed questions on why their question was closed, and what (if anything) they can do to have it reopened.
Previously, moderators had a single field we could use for customizing community specific close reasons. We now have five. I've detailed them below (by which I mean I mostly stole these descriptions from Spevacus post here). Keep in mind that, with the exception of the brief description, we have a limit of 500 characters for each field.
- Brief description (100 characters) - Visible in the close/flag dialog in bold. Should be very succinct, only spanning a couple of words. In the example below, this would be "Game Design and Development".
- Usage guidance - Tells close voters when to use the close reason. Ideally, this is descriptive enough to cover edge cases, and that detail should inspire confidence in close voters that this reason is the right choice under specified circumstances. In the example below, this would be "Questions about Game Design and Development are off topic. You might want to ask over at Game Development SE, but be sure to read their FAQ."
Post notice close description - Visible to all users, the post notice description should follow the format "This question was closed because it is ... It is not currently accepting answers." In the below image, this goes in the top section of the close reason notice.
Post owner guidance - Visible only to the post author, this should explain to the OP why their question was closed, and give detailed information on what (if anything) they can do to improve their post to get it reopened. Helpful links to the help center would be nice to include. In the below image, this goes in the bottom section of the close reason notice.
Privileged user guidance - Visible to all other users (i.e. everyone but the post owner). Users with the cast close votes privilege will be able to see the list of users who voted to close the question. This should inform close voters on how best to guide the asker in improving their question or inform them when the question should be reopened.
So this is going to be quite the task, and it's going to take several weeks to complete. The moderator teams plan is to handle this one close reason at a time. We'll make a meta post for one of the close reasons, and spend a week or two collecting feedback from the community on how we should update this close reason. Once a consensus has been reached, the moderator team will update the close reason and alert the community of this via a new meta. We'll then make a new meta for the next close reason we're planning on updating.
One final note. We know that users may have suggestions for one or two of the fields, but not all five of them. If that's the case, please feel free to still make answers with your suggestions. In the event that a partial suggestion is highly upvoted, then the moderator team may go with a mixture of suggestions to form the new close reason. If we decide on this course of action, we'll make a new meta before updating the close reason for any final community feedback on the new Frankensteined close reason.
