Signature identification/verification is arguably the number 1 reason for closed questions on Sports SE. Taking a quick look at the stats on closed posts, you can see that "Other" is the most common reason for closing a post, while most of the specified reasons for this category is related to autograph-identification. Of course the above link only shows stats for the past 90 days at any given time, nonetheless, this pattern of high signature identification closed posts has been going on ever since this tag was declared off-topic
Given the volume of signature questions we continue to get, I'm proposing (can I?) to add autograph-identification to the list of default close reasons. These are the benefits I see for doing so:
- Have 1 official description for marking these questions closed, which includes all necessary links
- Reduces the amount of effort to vote one of these questions closed
The only place on Meta I've seen this topic come up is on this answer. Here phil mentions that we can only have 3 custom close reasons, meaning that to add a new one, we'd have to remove one of the following existing reasons:
- Questions on outdoor activities unrelated to a specific, competitive sport are off-topic here, but can be asked on The Great Outdoors Stack Exchange.
- General health and medical advice is off-topic here; you should contact a qualified medical professional instead.
- Questions on exercise and fitness unrelated to a specific, competitive sport are off-topic here, but can be asked on Physical Fitness Stack Exchange.
There's also a bit of discussion on the comments section of that answer which I thought deserved a thread of its own here.
So what do you guys think? Do we need to add a new close reason for autograph-identification? If so, which of the existing custom reasons should be removed? Or should we combine some of the reasons into one?
