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As per my earlier Meta post, we will be updating all of our community specific close reasons to follow the new and improved close reason format.

We'll be starting with our technical support for modded Minecraft close reason, which currently looks like this:

Requests for technical support of modded Minecraft are off-topic, including crashes, errors or other abnormal behavior caused by modding. See Where can I ask troubleshooting questions about modded Minecraft? for other places to go, or clarify your question if the issue persists without any installed mods.

Since this is our first attempt at this, we plan to keep this one active until June 7th (ish). As a reminder, you can include partial suggestions, and the mod team will do its best to incorporate all the feedback.

The five (new) fields are:

  • Brief description (100 character limit):
    Visible in the close/flag dialog. Very succinct.

  • Usage guidance (500 character limit):
    When to use this 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.

  • Post notice close description (500 character limit):
    Visible to all users, the post notice description should follow the format "This question was closed because it is... It is currently not accepting answers.".

  • Post owner guidance (500 character limit):
    Visible only to the post author, this explains to the OP why their question was closed, and gives detailed information on what (if anything) they can do to improve their post to get it reopened.
    Helpful links to the help center are good to include.

  • Privileged user guidance (500 character limit):
    Visible to everyone but the post owner. This field should inform close voters on how best to guide the OP in improving their question.

Examples can be found here.

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    [I added the five fields to the question. It might be easier while writing an answer, depending on the user's working method.]
    – Joachim
    Commented May 25 at 19:48
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    This has fallen to the wayside due to some real life stuff going on, but I'm planning to revisit this very soon.
    – Wipqozn Mod
    Commented Jun 16 at 20:25
  • Any updates on this?
    – Otakuwu
    Commented Jul 3 at 18:30
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    @Otaku Please see my recently posted answer.
    – Wipqozn Mod
    Commented Jul 3 at 19:23

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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I think the current "other abnormal behavior caused by modding" phrasing in our close reason is what's causing users to sometimes close modded Minecraft questions for broader reasons than we originally intended.

Looking back at our original discussion in Minecraft crash questions should be made off-topic: yes/no?, we specifically made only modded Minecraft crash questions off-topic. Our subsequent discussions in Why just ban Minecraft modding tech support?, What exactly is technical support?, and Update the off-topic reason for "Technical support for non-vanilla Minecraft" in the help-center clarified that only crash issues and other technical issues related to running modded Minecraft should be off-topic.

Beyond those specific cases, modded Minecraft questions are perfectly on-topic. As long as the game itself is working (boots up, loads worlds, doesn't crash), questions about mod content, features, or gameplay mechanics should remain on-topic.

With that in mind, here's my initial take on the post owner guidance. My main change here is simply removing the "other abnormal behavior" part from the existing guidance, which I think is the most problematic bit. I've also swapped out the general term "errors" for the more specific "technical issues":

Brief description:

Modded Minecraft Technical Support

Post owner guidance:

Requests for technical support of modded Minecraft are off-topic, including crashes or other technical issues caused by modding. See Where can I ask troubleshooting questions about modded Minecraft? for other places to go, or clarify your question if the issue persists without any installed mods.

I'm still working through the other description and guidance fields. I'll update this post with those later. In the meantime, I'd appreciate any feedback on this direction, particularly whether this clearer distinction between technical issues (off-topic) and gameplay/content issues (on-topic) makes sense to everyone. I'm also wondering if we should include "performance problems" or "compatibility problems" in the close reason.

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    I'm one of those users closing broad modded Minecraft questions, that "abnormal behavior" is really misleading
    – pinckerman
    Commented May 26 at 18:54
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Update: I've updated the close reason as outlined in this answer.

I've taken the suggestions from galacticninja and filled out the remaining fields. To that end, this is what I suggest we go with:

Brief description:

Modded Minecraft Technical Support

Usage guidance

Intended to be used for questions asking for technical support of modded Minecraft.

Close description

Questions asking for technical support for modded Minecraft are off-topic on Arqade.

Post owner guidance:

Requests for technical support of modded Minecraft are off-topic, including crashes or other technical issues caused by modding. See Where can I ask troubleshooting questions about modded Minecraft? for other places to go, or clarify your question if the issue persists without any installed mods.

Public guidance

Requests for technical support of modded Minecraft are off-topic, including crashes or other technical issues caused by modding. If the issue persists without mods, then the question should be reopened.

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I'm not sure if this is purely for the formatting of the question or whether we can suggest policy changes as well, but I personally have always been an advocate for expanding this close reason to technical support questions for all modded games, not just Minecraft. I know that we get relatively few technical support questions for other modded games, but they have the same inherent issues where it is quite hard to help troubleshoot something like that remotely, as many technically inclined people who have been suborned into family tech support can attest to...

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    I'd suggest making a new meta for this suggestion.
    – Wipqozn Mod
    Commented May 24 at 16:20
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    The problem with this is we have plenty of good technical support questions, and plenty of people who are good at troubleshooting. The ONLY reason modded Minecraft support is off topic was because users would throw a Null pointer exception at us, with 200+ mods installed, making technical support near impossible. We even support vanilla Minecraft troubleshooting, just not modded Minecraft :)
    – Robotnik Mod
    Commented May 25 at 23:43
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    This actually came up when we made Minecraft crash questions off-topic. User SevenSidedDie raised a good counterpoint (that I agree with) about why we shouldn't extend this to all modded games: (cont…)
    – galacticninja
    Commented May 26 at 0:55
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    … "Although that might appeal in a "rules should be rules" sense, it violates the No Elephants Allowed Sign rule-making principle: rules exist because they solve a real problem. Applying rules to non-problems because it's "fair" can cause more problems than they solve, such as unnecessary extra work applying or defending the rule. "Minecraft crash questions caused us problems, so I'm sorry but your simple question about Half-Life 3 crashing is off topic" is a hard stance to defend." — SevenSidedDie
    – galacticninja
    Commented May 26 at 0:55
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    @galacticninja/SevenSidedDie "Modded Half-Life 3" is the point Nzall is making here, though. But I agree: I believe there have been too few problems with modded games otherwise to consider this change.
    – Joachim
    Commented May 26 at 15:34

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