Revisiting custom close reasons

Question

It's been a while since these have been looked at, but I think that it's appropriate to revisit the issue.

Right now, we have two custom close reasons that are very similar to one another in scope:

Questions that cannot be generalized to apply to others in similar situations are off-topic. For assistance in writing questions that can apply to multiple people facing similar situations, see: What kinds of questions are too localized?

and

This question appears to be off-topic because it seems to seek specific advice for a very specific situation, and it's likely that only someone with a good understanding of your situation will be able to provide an objectively correct answer.

I can't see any situation in which one of these could apply, but the other couldn't.

[The other close reason is the often overused "Undergraduate" reason.]

Personally, I find myself using a variant on the "shopping question" tag a lot more frequently. I would recommend replacing one of the tags above with something such as:

We cannot offer recommendations or rankings of specific programs, courses, universities, or other similar requests, as these are primarily opinion-based.

Answer 1

I second that there is no need to distinguish between cannot be generalized and very specific advice and would like to suggest the following new wording for the close reason to compise them both:

The answer to this question strongly depends on individual factors such as a certain person’s preferences, a given institution’s regulations, the exact contents of your work or your personal values. Thus only somebody familiar with these can answer this question and it cannot be generalised to apply to others.

I chose to phrase it like this as many cases it should give the asker a strong hint where they can find an answer to their question, namely:

• a certain person’s preferences → ask that person (in most cases: the advisor) or or somebody who knows them.
• a given institution’s regulations → ask that university.
• the exact contents of your work → ask somebody who is familiar with your work, namely your supervisor, colleagues or yourself.
• your personal values → ask yourself, e.g., as to how much risk you are willing to take.

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I also second the demand for a shopping question and suggest the following wording:

Shopping questions, i.e., questions that seek individual universities, academic programs, publishers, journals, research topics or similar as an answer or seek an assessment or comparison of such, are off-topic.

I chose this wording to slightly expand the scope (in comparison to the existing suggestions) and explicitly include such cases, where the asker is not explicitly asking for a recommendation but only for the existence of a program (but implicitly wishes recommendation). This should reduce certain complaints made by the asker (“I wasn’t asking for a recomendation, I just wanted to know if …”) I have witnessed quite often.

Also, at the end of the day, many close reasons (such as this) exist due to problem arising from the answers. Defining the problem via the answers directly addresses the problem and makes the close reason specific to what it needs to be specfic about.

Answer 2

I absolutely concur with the assessment that "cannot be generalized" and "very specific advice" are largely redundant.

If we are to do away with one of the two, I would suggest removing "cannot be generalized" because I find myself using the other very often for "Hi, here's my situation, help?" questions.

I also like the idea of a "no shopping questions" close reason, which I would suggest to tweak to:

Suggestions or recommendations or comparison of specific universities, journal, research topics, etc (i.e., "shopping questions") are off-topic.

Mainly, I am suggesting we drop the 'primarily opinion-based' wording from your original suggestion for the "no shopping questions" reason because that is setting us up for argument that some distinctions are not just matters of opinion. Instead, I think it is OK to simply say that we do not do this as a matter of policy, since there are many good reasons to do so (opinion, "taking sides," unprofessionalism, tendency to gossip, overly broad libel laws, etc.)