Hey all,

Over the past few months (and even further back than that), we've been getting a daily bombardment of "question" threads. Most of them are on-topic, but the vast majority of those fit into one of a few categories:

• Unrealistic hypothetical posts that are intended to "get a discussion going"... i.e. "If you could clone a player 10 times, what player would make the best overall team?" or "What would be your favorite XI of left-footed players under 5'9", none of whom natively speak the language of the country in which they play?"

• Obscure (or sometimes really basic) rules questions / clarifications - i.e. "Can a player shape his hair in the shape of a bowl and put the ball in there and carry it down the field and score?" or "Can someone explain how the best third placed team thing works for qualifying for the knockouts of the Euros?"

• Insults / flaming in the form of a question - "DAE think Messi actually sux?" or "What club has the worst supporters?"

• Purely opinion-based questions - "Is Messi or Ronaldo better?" or "What is your favorite World Cup theme song?" or "What's your favorite headed goal?"

• Unoriginal copy-cat questions - "Related to this other question, what about this slight change but otherwise identical question?"

• Question about a current match that should really just be a comment in the match thread - "Why did Pepe just get red-carded for that?" or "Did anyone see that cool move Hazard made?"

All-in-all, we want to do what we can to encourage discussion here. We enjoy original, intelligent, and thought-provoking content. However, many of these questions fall quite flat. No matter how well intentioned, the vast majority of the initial responses on these questions are claims of shitposting or general trolling / joke responses. This does not make for a healthy discussion or feeling of a welcoming community.

In addition, the admins have today announced that karma is going to start being awarded for self-posts (again). This makes the question situation quite dire indeed, as karma-junkies are going to start posting them more and more frequently. This means our new queue is going to be utter garbage, and will generally lower the overall quality of the content that can be found here.

Daily Questions Thread

In recognition of all of this, but with regard to our desire to encourage discussion here, we are going to be disallowing questions as top-level posts here. Instead, we will be having AutoModerator post a "Daily Questions Thread" every day at 10:00 AM GMT. It will also automatically update a static link to the current day's page in the sidebar, so it should be quite easy to find that day's thread.

This thread will work as a medium in which any manner of football-related questions can be asked and answered. Starting with the posting of tomorrow's daily thread, questions submitted as top-level posts will be removed and the posters will be asked to submit them to the questions thread instead. We feel this is a good compromise in order to allow people to foster discussion while also keeping our subreddit a bit tidier and generally more "news" oriented.

This is a trial situation. If, after a short evaluation period, we deem this to be a move detrimental to the quality of the subreddit, we will happily cancel this policy and again allow questions as they currently are.

Cool, thanks bros,

-thekrone (on behalf of the mod team)

tl;dr no more questions as top-level posts, only allowed in the "Daily Questions Thread" from here on out.

[EDIT] Some clarifying points:

• This is not a change to limit the amount of work we have to do. In fact, we're pretty positive that this change will mean far more work for us overall. We'll spend less time removing "bad" questions from the new queue, but we're going to spend a whole lot more having discussions with people in modmail.

• The primary purposes for this change are:

1. Clean up the new queue
2. Lessen the overall complaints about shitposting
3. Actually get people answers to their genuine questions without fear of ridicule or mocking
4. Avoid the karma race with the new karma for self-posts rule

• This will not affect the current rules on other types of self-posts. Only questions.

• To reiterate: This is a trial. If this really makes the subreddit worse and people really hate it that much, we'll revert the decision.