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Here's our current close reason for asking about lists of works:

Requests for lists of works or recommendations are off-topic as they do not fit our questions and answers format. Feel free to ask about people's favorites in chat.

There are a couple of problems with this close reason:

  1. It links to a frozen chat room which has been renamed to "Poisoned room; it is defunct." — not the best place to link newcomers.
  2. The phrase "questions and answers format" links to http://scifi.stackexchange.com/about which redirects to the site's tour page. That is a good place to link newcomers, and it does mention what kind of questions are OK to ask, but perhaps one of these would be a better and more specific page to link to:

The technical issues of the correct URL for meta and using HTTPS instead of HTTP are addressed in:

Minor technical issues with off-topic close box

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  • 1
    Good catch, I'm all for this.
    – Gallifreyan
    Jun 7, 2017 at 7:55
  • 1
    Quick point, the chat link for new users, (and anyone under 10k rep?) just leads to a page not found result rather than abnything about a poisoned chat room.
    – Bellerophon
    Jun 7, 2017 at 14:10

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
10
  1. Yes
    We should point to the new chat room.
  2. Maybe
    Perhaps the best option would be to create a clean, canonical question-answer pair on meta, tag it with , and then point to that.
2
  • 1. Should we remove the link to the chat room wholesale (given our "history") or should we just update it to market the room as newbie-friendly now that we have a clean slate? 2. Good idea.
    – tobiasvl
    Jun 7, 2017 at 7:28
  • 8
    Chat requires 20 rep to participate. Closing a newcomer's question, inviting them to ask it in chat, and then telling them "Sorry, you're not allowed to do that until you ask good questions" is kind of... rude.
    – Kevin
    Jun 8, 2017 at 21:06

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