Tortliena

Thanks. I'll admit I wasn't kind to you this week, so it takes efforts from you to say this, and know I know that.

That's probably the most important thing to remember in life :)

A meta-post telling I'm leaving would surely have received better community reception, but worse actual listening, as shown with the other posts of people leaving.

In that regard, I'm sorry it fell on this specific comment. This sure made it feel like an unjustified outburst

More or less. It's more like a bowl filling up. It happened to be the last drop it needed to make it overflow.

By "did" I mean thinking over my presence here

That's what I did, since... 6 months? Perhaps a year, I can't remember.

The problem is that I tried reasonably, multiple times. I can't be nice everytime, hoping that things would go well "eventually".

I'd probably look over old chat talks, but I guess that would not be easy to find.

I'm not here to be "cool", especially when I'm one click away from leaving this community. If you want the time period when you can find my growing disagreement with how the site was going, check when I asked my last question. That's around when I was more and more unhappy.

We've been over this a long time ago, and I've been over it trying to make cases for multiple other questions, without results. I'm tired of all this, so I won't.

Yes, and I needed you to tell it's absurd to make my point. To go through all this mental process. As annoying as it has certainly been for you.

Yes, it isn't, and it's one of the lucky questions.

Or should I say what people do.

Yet, that's what you do

votes, to be accurate.

Yes I understand, and that's my point of my vote-to-close.

That's what "how can I reach goal X" is, at its core.

But most importantly, that's absurd to think restricting more and more questions, making users flee on a site that is starting to heavily lack in worldbuilding expertise (be it pure knowledge or genuine creativity) will help querents, what I'm solely here for.

And if this site starts removing the tactics tag (something I wasn't expecting at the time I voted to close), I will leave, too. Because that is fundamentally absurd to think again that tags change what questions are asked, that they are even carefully read by people. Because that is absurd to close questions about character choices, or questions dependent on story circumstances depending on who talks, if we take these rules rigorously.

Is it good for this site? I can confirm the answer is no, since we are losing a lot of users : Willk left because his creative answers got deleted, Otkin left because as far as I know her domain of expertise was repeatedly refused, NathanielB who was still relatively new felt litterally insulted. MichaelK is thinking of leaving, etc.

So when I see you JBH, or any other telling that it's all dependent on story circumstances, I can't help but cry because that's exactly the contrary of the science behind strategy. It's like telling that because you know one man wearing skirts that we can't affirm that the majority of men only wear pants. It's also the whole reason sociology questions are absent now and if not very often closed.

And what I see in most military questions outside this one, for instance the ones of the type "how can X defeat Y", is that these rules are -often- inconsistently used. A deep, wrong understanding of what the science of strategy and tactic is, from a lot of people including you.

"There isn’t a specific policy against strategy questions, but as natural consequence of prohibiting broad or POB questions, and the definition of worldbuilding, such questions are rarely appropriate." The problem isn't about a prohibition on a specific topic, but the rules that lead to inconsistent calls because indeed, this is absurd.

(and yes, survival strategy is a personification of biology. That's an analogy that wasn't necessarily made to prove, but rather to explain and strike your mind)

"By this argument you should VTC every biology question on this site. It’s a patently ridiculous argument. If the core ask was about say “giant crab shell nutritional needs” you’re ask is related to the crab’s survival strategy, but the question is not asking about strategy.". Exactly; this is absurd and that's the whole point here.

"You can argue that if you squint that technically theres a strategy implied by the answers. However that’s not the standard of review on this site." ; Indeed, we're not reviewing answers, but questions.

And that's what everyone here misunderstand here with the science of strategy and tactical thinking.

All answers are fundamentally an equipment strategy. Like telling crabs having shells is a good survival strategy.

Now regarding why I am not considering "Just equip them with the most effective PPE available within your budget." you misunderstood me. If I'm not considering it as a viable answer, it's because it's the paraphrased question at its core. It's a non-answer in strategy, like answering "how can I make my sky green?" with "Make your sky green!".

If you think what I'm doing is of bad faith, remember I'm doing a reflection of your rules, just much more consistent with them.

@Sphennings What can be considered of bad faith is saying strategy is accepted while also agreeing that tactics are off-topic. It is also inconsistent -as a more neutral word- that your working example is about invasions, invasions you clearly stated as off-topic.

So yes, I would not be satisfied, but that's still about a series of choice : "Take wool, it's a good strategy to protect yourself from fire.". "Don't choose leather, it doesn't protect from fire and will make you fail your firefighting objectives."...

"Just equip them with the most effective PPE available within your budget." is paraphrasing what my question asks : "How and with what would you design a team of firefighter protective equipment as effectively as possible...?"

@Sphennings The fact my past-self was satisfied with the answers doesn't matter. This site has rules in regards to asking questions and we have to follow them. If an old question doesn't fit the current rules, it must be closed.

(let's recall though that firefighting is often tied to the militaries. In France, firefighters or "sapeurs pompiers" is for the most part militaries, and fun fact "sapeur" means military engineering as it was their military group at first, among other reasons)

But in the end, making your strategy is about making a series of individual choices, choices you (try to) play out later. And this works both in and out of world, in and out of military topics.

Strategy is all about "choosing" an ideal approach to reach an expected goal. Some strategies are inherently bad -Don't throw your firefighters naked-, others give likely better outcomes.

Or perhaps headhunt strong and courageous people, and create meetings between them and the leader to see if they are fit with the rest of the team. Or do nothing, because right now your objectives are already fulfilled and having more people can hurt your teams' average expertise.

And strategies are layered : When looking for human resources, what should be the recruiting strategy? What is the goal in mind? Not to fight fires directly, but to have qualified human "fire"power to fight fires. What are the individual actions to have this power? Post recruitement campaigns in big cities, where the goal to have manpower is higher then create recruitement centers to focus.

I also failed on the longer-term level at changing the approach the whole community should get to review questions. Some improvements were made, then lost, then remade, but what this back and forth made in the end is some sort of stagnant, immovable movement (pardon me the contradiction :) ). It's the reason some outsiders -so to speak- like Otkin, Willk, and many others decided to leave, even after their attempts to change things... Or, well, at least tried to change them.

I also failed because I didn't get them inspired to know more, and the community lost one of its members who had some good ideas in their belt.

I failed at a low level because Nathaniel didn't get the chance to have even more accurate answers, for instance as to who should care for the radioactive components (I doubt NTSB are experts on that matter).

In that regard I failed, and I only say this word when no-one gets the piece of cake in my stead.

That's a rare miracle people doesn't get demotivated after their question got closed twice or thrice. Some like Thunderhammer doesn't lose their grip and perservere, but to be honest, that's more due to their willpower to get through the cogs and the existence of the sandbox than reviewers inspiring to do more and, well, just to improve.

But a good part the underlying reason the query doesn't change is that people still don't tell how the question can be improved, they keep it to why it has been closed.

Indeed, comments are transient, temporary and not the question, so unless I simply misread the query (this happens quite a lot x) ), I cannot really vote to reopen.

However, changing my mind does happen. The problem is that most people don't edit their question, which makes it hard to make a point in reopening.

For your replaceable barrel question, sorry to disappoint you but I just didn't agree with the closure from the very start ^^". If you check out the revisions, you'll see I'm not part of the close-voters.

@MichaelK Thanks for your insight. Unfortunately and as you can see throughout JBH's meta-answer, the community is not in a state of self-reflection yet. By that I'm not saying JBH should have told "it's acceptable", but at least give a word of measurement like Elemtilas did... Or asking for pardon like I did.