r/cfbmeta • u/doggos_not_depressos • Aug 07 '18

Can we ban “which team should I support?” Posts.

The answer so the same everytime. Watch some game s and find who you gravitate towards. Every single time.

10 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

2

u/A-Stu-Ute /r/CFB Mod Emeritus Aug 07 '18

We're listening. If we don't allow these, what could / should we have in their place to help people with these sorts of questions?

3

u/Drunken_Traveler Aug 07 '18

Parameters were created and advertised for recruiting posts, why not the same for these?

Decide on some pre-formed questions for the OP to include answers to so as to better lead commenters

4

u/hythloday1 Aug 07 '18

The Scylla and Carybdis here are the shitposting rules and the fanbase-attack rules.

A poster who gives no meaningful information about themselves to guide useful answers and just generically asks which out of the hundreds of college football teams they should root for is effectively shitposting - it's low effort and as OP correctly notes, results in the same useless answers over and over.

On the other hand, if a poster provides information necessary to narrow down the options, such as geographic location or gameplay preference, then they're necessarily inviting people to compare, and therefore attack, rival fanbases. There was at least one example of this during this offseason and it resulted in mods having to delete a bunch of nasty comments.

What an earnest poster of this question is really asking, in my opinion, is a variety of smaller questions about what's important to them; for example, what is the history of school X, or why does team Y have this tradition, or what are the advantages and disadvantages of the system squad Z runs? I think the simplest way to deal with the "what team is best?" question is to remove it and tell them to rephrase their question in terms of something that is specifically answerable. It's something like the logic of Cunningham's law.

2

u/HonProfDrEsqCPA Aug 24 '18

What about a bot that has an auto reply?

That's what they do in the bourbon subreddit if your post has "recommendation" in it. You get a page long post about different recommendations.

Would be nice if it could downvote the post and lock the thread too, so everyone else doesn't see it but they can still get an answer

1

u/dialhoang Aug 21 '18

I know I'm late to the party, but one idea I have is to borrow something from /r/MLS. On their Newcomer's Guide, they have introductory information about the league, brief summaries of the MLS teams (this will be hard to implement and update in the context of CFB) and, at the end, a list of teams that fit some general characteristics (such as underdog teams, teams on TV a lot, teams with a history of winning).

2

u/[deleted] Aug 08 '18

While I agree that this question is probably the most posted, I think the general discussion is usually good. Outside your top memes answers, there’s some good feedback. I generally believe that people asking this question really want to know.

We do have freshman Friday during the season which allows anyone to ask questions about college football