What buzzwords am I missing to not get my question closed?

Question

I find this whole thing rather sad. I am one of the most active users on the site and I ask a simple question - about skiing - https://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/15498/what-can-one-expect-when-skiing-in-warmer-weather

I did not say there was a race or there wasn't a race. I just asked about what to expect in certain weather conditions. Then I get someone pegging the question with comments and works it into the close queue and eventually gets put on hold.

Seriously WTF is wrong here?

It is about a sport and is a question that will take some background in the area to answer. This is after the mountain of simpleton, I can look it up on wikipedia in 3 seconds get OK'ed by everyone and answered by the mods but a REAL sports question comes in and it is closed.

Answer 1

You stated in the first sentence of the question,

We planned a weekend trip a while back to ski.

You made it a question that is off-topic, according to

• the close-vote reason (emphasis added)

Questions on exercise and fitness unrelated to a specific, competitive sport are off-topic here, ...

• the on-topic page (emphasis added)

Sports Stack Exchange is for participants, hobbyists, and fans of all sports and forms of competitive physical activity.

• the on-topic page again (emphasis added)

...

Sports Stack Exchange is NOT a forum. Some kinds of questions should NOT be asked here: ...

• Recreation, Fitness, or Outdoor activities

"Skiing" is not a specific, competitive sport, any more than "running" or "swimming" or "throwing" is a specific competitive sport. We have and do and will close any question about those activities whenever they are not about the competitive aspects, or whenever they are explicitly about general noncompetitive aspects.

Suggestions for avoiding the exact problem were denounced as an example of why comments should be downvoteable, as not making sense, and as just wrong. Instead of engaging with objective critique, the problem was simply denied to exist; no clarification of meaning was sought; there is now resort to personal remarks which are neither relevant nor supported by evidence.

That is why your question received five close-votes as off-topic with the recommendation that you ask it on The Great Outdoors. That is why I without reservation, oppose its reopening in current form.

Answer 2

My position hasn't really changed from my answer to this question from last year, which I think pretty clearly established the community consensus that a question really does have to be directly about the competitive aspects of a sport for it to be on-topic here, particularly if there's another site on the network which would be a good fit for the question. In that case, it was Physical Fitness, in this case it's The Great Outdoors.

I don't think it's worth getting so grumpy about this - just post the question on The Great Outdoors and get the answers you're looking for.