Do we have room for a custom close reason for future works?

Question

We have had a long-standing policy that questions asking about material from unproduced future works should be closed until such time as they are answerable.

The meta consensus was that we should close them as primarily opinion-based, which is as close to a legitimate reason as we can get. But it isn't really right -- in many cases, these questions do have objective answers, we just can't know them yet.

Even worse, people are not consistent with the close reason they use, since none of them actually specify "future works". We get them closed, for example, as "off-topic" or "too-broad" as well. It also shows up repeatedly in the list of custom close reasons people type in for off-topic questions. For example, of the 14 "custom" close reasons this month, 10 of them are "future works".

Do we have room to add in a custom close reason for this -- one that not only specifies why the question is being closed, but also links to the meta discussion, as well as reminding people that the question could be reopened in the future?

Answer 1

Currently, all three custom off-topic close reasons are being used. They are as follows:

The third (generic) close reason was added last September.

There is an explanation by @Shog9 on Meta.SE as to why there are only three reasons allowed, but also that an additional reason can be added if there is a need (emphasis mine):

Large lists make selection tedious and difficult. Fortunately, most sites do not attract an extremely high volume of off-topic questions, and those that are asked tend to be about a relatively small number of topics - therefore, we limit the number of active reasons to 3. A few sites do get a regular influx of off-topic questions in a larger number of distinct categories; if you find this to be the case on your site, post a feature-request on your meta site with examples of questions that would benefit from a predefined off-topic option - we'll verify the need for this and work with you to make more reasons available.

If the community would like to explore the possibility of adding a "future works" close reason (or replacing the current generic one), I'd suggest opening up a new meta discussion with the feature request (as outlined in Shog's Meta.SE post).