What custom close reasons might we want?

Question

As discussed on meta.stackoverflow, we may soon have a few custom close reasons, in addition to all the canned ones. A short summary of the setup we'll be looking at:

• "unclear what you're asking", "too broad", and "primarily opinion-based" will replace "not a real question" and "not constructive".
• "too localized" will go away.
• "off topic" will have up to three pre-selected off-topic reasons, and also allow entering a free-form reason when you vote to close.

What are our pre-selected off-topic reasons? From the announcement: "These lists will be determined by the communities, and moderators will be able to update them, subject to review by each other, their community, and the SE team."

So, community, what'll it be? Keep in mind that we do still have unclear/broad/subjective reasons, so we don't necessarily need a custom reason for every category of commonly-closed question.

And for reference, here's a sampling of questions recently closed as off-topic or too localized.

Answer 1

My list would be similar to Jefromi's but with a few important differences. Here is my list, with explanations and rationale:

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General Food Question

Seasoned Advice is a site for culinary Q&A. We expect questions here to relate to some aspect of cooking or food preparation. This question appears to be about some other aspect of food, such as eating or shopping, which is not a good fit for our site.

Alternative Wording:

Food Sourcing and Consumption

This question falls into one of the general categories of finding, selecting, or eating food. We expect questions on Seasoned Advice to have a culinary focus, i.e. to be about cooking or preparing food or a directly-related topic such as kitchen equipment or food science.

This doesn't cover quite as many off-topic scenarios as I'd like, but it has the benefit of being clearer and less open to abuse.

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Recipe Request or Poll

While we allow some questions related to recipe modification or "repair", this question is worded as a broad request for recipes or variations on a recipe, and is therefore a better candidate for a recipe search engine such as AllRecipes or SuperCook.

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Health or Nutrition Focused

This question is requesting dietary recommendations which tend to be situational, subjective, unreliable, controversial, or all of the above. Our community is usually happy to answer questions about food safety or about nutrition as it relates to a specific cooking objective (for example, low-fat/low-carb substitutions in a recipe); however, questions about what to eat should be referred to a dietitian or other health professional.

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I think "sourcing" is probably covered under "general food question".

I've tried a few times to think up a good close reason/explanation for the neverending stream of "I left this slab of beef out on the counter for 12 years, can I still eat it?" questions, but haven't yet come up with an adequate catch-all explanation that's valid for all the questions we'd want to use it to close. Despite that, I'm going to try to keep thinking of one because IMO the situation with those questions on our site is far worse than simple duplication, and (again IMO) they should be as easy to close as possible without having to go find the original all the time.

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P.S. The headings above are not part of the close reason! They are only there for the benefit of easy categorization in this discussion. The new close reasons will not have individual headings, they will all be a subcategory of "off topic". Here is what the screen currently looks like on Meta Stack Overflow:

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P.P.S. I put together an infographic to describe what we seem to generally agree (I think) as being the site's scope:

This illustrates - very coarsely - the different stages of a meal, from inception all the way to consumption.

The "execution" is obviously our sweet spot, it's where we want and expect to get most of our questions. Then there are some adjacent, fuzzier areas where questions might be off-topic, but wouldn't be off-topic on general principle - it would be more of an "is this interesting or relevant to culinary professionals/enthusiasts?" test.

But the gray bubbles are off-topic on general principle and should almost always be closed. So with my 3 reasons, I'm trying to cover everything outside the dotted lines, while still hinting that not everything inside them is actually on topic.

Another approach could be to focus entirely on what's explicitly outside the boundary, and use the "freeform" close reasons for anything we catch inside. That might be clearer, hence my alternate wording of "food sourcing and consumption" above.

Answer 2

FYI: Aaronut's answer contains full descriptions, essentially matching these. Think of this answer more as background, demonstrating why something like these should be our top three choices.

My suggestions (full descriptions to be determined):

• Health/nutrition
• Recipe/menu requests - "a recipe for X", "what's for dinner", "dishes using X" (culinary uses)
• possibly: Sourcing - "where can I buy X?"

Sourcing is less common, so if someone comes up with another category, or wants to split culinary uses away from recipe requests, that's the one that could be removed. It's also a little dodgy - we don't have complete consensus on exactly which sourcing questions to allow, and making a category for it might encourage people to simply throw all such questions out, which probably isn't what we want.

Background:

I went through the first 50 questions from the query above. Many of them fit into common categories:

• 13 recipe/menu requests (including broad things like creating meal plans)
• 17 health/nutrition questions
• 5 culinary uses questions
• 4 sourcing questions (where can I buy X - one was equipment, not food)
• 3 too localized food safety questions (very specific situations)

The questions that didn't fit into those categories, turned into concise statements:

• Why do humans drink milk as adults?
• What's a good phone recipe app?
• Where can I find this person called "Doctor Toffee"?
• How do I tell if a vegetable is organic?
• How do I store cannabis butter?
• Is this brand of whiskey from Iraq?
• Why won't my iSi whipper release? (it actually wasn't charged)
• How do I save my cookie dough? (the recipe was bad)
• Why does food taste bland when we're sick?
• What can I use to decorate dog biscuits?
• How do I get rid of odd fridge smell? (mixing odors, not old fridge smell)
• Can I install a commercial oven in my house?
• How do I tell what size a folded tablecloth is?

Some of those questions could probably have been saved - for example, saving cookie dough which turned out to be a bad recipe could've just been edited into "why didn't this cookie dough work?" But in any case, there doesn't seem to be enough of an overarching theme to create another category from.

The specific food safety questions don't really merit a custom close reason. (Plus, they can probably be instead closed as duplicates of a more generic question, though this may need to be created out of what's now in the food-safety tag wiki.) So the main categories are recipe/menu requests, culinary uses, health/nutrition, and sourcing. Culinary use questions are very similar to recipe/menu requests, so they seem reasonable to group together and make room for another reason. Not coincidentally, this lines up fairly well with our faq, with the addition of shopping questions!

Answer 3

I am uncomfortable with the proposed category:

General Food Question

Seasoned Advice is a site for culinary Q&A. We expect questions here to relate to some aspect of cooking or food preparation. This question appears to be about some other aspect of food, such as eating or shopping, which is not a good fit for our site.

Intent

This would really be our default food-related, but still off-topic category, which is hard to come up with a neat label for. I would update the description as shown here, but I am at a loss as to what to label it to make it clear. Since I am in healthcare, I want to use the prefix "peri" which means surrounding or related, as in "Peri-Food Question" but that won't be clear to most readers.

Suggested Rephrasing

Peri-Food Question [Temporary heading pending a better suggestion]

Seasoned Advice is a site for culinary Q&A. We expect questions here to relate to some aspect of cooking or food preparation, including:

• Methods or techniques of food preparation or cooking
• Science behind food or cooking
• Objective food facts related to the actual qualities or properties of foods
• Equipment used in food preparation or cooking
• History and culture of food and cooking

This question appears to be about some other aspect of food, such as eating or shopping, which is not a good fit for our site.

Why

I don't think the original was phrased to properly express the actual intent.

We specifically allow questions on equipment, and from previous meta discussion, on culinary or food history or anthropology.

In addition to those categories, here are some sample questions I think could be interpreted to fall into the Food Related Question category under the original phrasing above, all from the top active questions pages at the time of this meta:

• What type of yogurt is most similar to the yogurt used in authentic Middle-Eastern cuisine?

  This isn't about preparation, but a comparison of ingredients across regions.

• Why does instant coffee have less caffeine?

  This is a food fact question.

• What is the New Zealand white sponge cake, is it a white cake here in the U.S?

  This is a cross-cultural naming question, not a preparation question.

• Digital recipes storage?

  I actually think this one should be disallowed because it is a poll, but its certainly not a direct culinary question. One might at a stretch consider it an equipment question in the broadest sense, but it is only tangentially related to cooking or preparation.

Answer 4

I am unhappy with the current situation of "I left my food out, is it safe to eat" questions. The closing as a duplicate after the first canonical question was created reduced the influx, but they did not disappear, and currently they seem to be on the rise.

These questions are not good for us. Our site is created to cater for people trying to reach a rational decision after weighing the relevant information. These questions do not come from people trying to make a rational decision, so our system fails in handling them. We should close them before they do damage to the OP, to our community and to our signal-to-noise ratio.

Neither answering them nor closing them as duplicates is a good solution. They require a very general rule to be applied in a uniform manner to a specific case (which interests nobody but the asker). Imagine if math.stackexchange was flooded by questions asking "How much is 4 + 7", "How much is 9 + 3" and so on. It is ridiculous to answer them all. On the other hand, they are not really a duplicate of the canonical questions we created. The canonical questions describe a rule, but an one can only arrive at the answer of the specific questions after applying the rule.

What we want to do with our site is help people solve a problem. Is the OP's problem "I don't know how to correctly store food"? The wording of most of them leads me to believe that it isn't. They tend to recognize that they did something wrong when they forgot their groceries overnight in the car. Their problem is not missing knowledge, it is cognitive dissonance. "I want to eat this, because [I spent so much money on it | I feel that the normal food safety rules are too paranoid | I don't believe I will get sick if I eat it ], but I am aware that I hurt the rules of proper storage. Please give me absolution and tell me that I may eat it." We cannot solve this problem by linking to a rule which says "if you did not store it like this, throw it out". First, the people who ask already seem to know that their practice is unsafe (we could only once or twice confirm that the food is within limits). Second, I doubt that they have the motivation to read through a long explanation which requires interpretation for their special case - humans are known for muddling through, confirmation bias, and other tendencies which would make them avoid reading the question to which we sent them.

The way I have been handling this until now was to close the question with a link to the canonical one, but also clearly give the actual answer ("No, it is not safe, throw it out") in the comment I leave before closing. I am not sure that this is helping the OP; I am sure that closing the question without such a mention will not help any. When they are looking for an explanation for their feeling that their case is an exception to the rule, citing the rule at them again does not change their feeling. These questions don't help the next asker, because they again feel that their situation is special. Anybody thought about how these first-time posters find our site? I just googled "I left meat out is it still good", and we are the third hit, with the question Why is it dangerous to eat meat which has been left out and then cooked?. If these people find this (or one of the old closed questions) with their search and still ask their own question, then they obviously won't change their opinion after seeing the old closed questions and the answer leading to the canonical question. And of course, these questions do not have value for us who handle them. They are just annoying. And at last, if we don't close the questions quickly enough, there is the chance that somebody will answer on the lines of "I ate stinky meat once and nothing happened, you will be alright", which is dangerous.

So I agree with Aaronut that the current situation of closing them as duplicates does not work well, and that a custom closing reason is the next best thing. We could word the reason for example as

Unsafe food storage - This question concerns the safety 
of consuming food which the OP thinks has been stored 
unsafely. We take it as undebatable fact that food which has been stored 
under improper conditions should be discarded. The rules under which food 
is considered properly stored are determined by legislature; we have a 
short write-up here<links to our canonical questions>. 

This requires the same amount of work for closing per question. But it tells the guilty OP seeking absolution that he/she won't find it here. It still contains the link to proper food safety instructions for those who want to read them. And it removes the ambiguity of closing them as duplicates. I hope that in the future, people who find a question closed with such a text will be more likely to refrain from posting a new question.

Answer 5

Picking and choosing between the options already presented,

recipe request

While we allow some questions related to recipe modification or "repair", this question is worded as a broad request for recipes or variations on a recipe, and is therefore a better candidate for a recipe search engine such as AllRecipes or SuperCook.

Aaronut's text except I prefer to drop "or Poll" from the heading. The existing "not constructive" close-reason already mentions polling so let's not create any potential for ambiguity.

peripheral question

Seasoned Advice is a site for culinary Q&A. We expect questions here to relate to some aspect of cooking or food preparation, including:

• Methods or techniques of food preparation or cooking
• Science behind food or cooking
• Objective food facts related to the actual qualities or properties of foods
• Equipment used in food preparation or cooking
• History and culture of food and cooking

This question appears to be about some other aspect of food, such as eating, shopping, nutritional value or some other health consideration, which is not a good fit for our site.

Mostly SAJ14SAJ's text with suggested heading. I've squeezed in heath and nutrition here so as to leave room for...

unanswerable food safety question

This question concerns a food safety issue where there is either no authoritative source to draw advice from, or the original poster is asking whether to risk ignoring such advice.

We refuse to advise any course of action, with regards to food safety, other than that which is provided by legislative bodies such as the FDA, USDA or similar.