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Paragraphs like this:

If you're innocent of both by admission of officer testimony, then simply basing it on a 5-year-old traffic survey for failure of proof seems to me a gross miscarriage of justice that's unbecoming conduct of a magistrate who's decision is nothing more than a legal absurdity against the interests of justice ripe for vacating and possibly a complaint for the obvious attempt of extortion under color of office incl. There are other violations of such statues USC 42 1983 etc.

I'm using "policy" rather loosely. Basically, will this site look to remove paragraphs like this from questions? Or will we leave these in as respecting the intent of the asker?

2 Answers 2

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I would advocate a "no ranting" custom. Plenty of users are going to come here and rant in the beginning. But to the degree they have a coherent question they should be guided to edit it to conform to the norms of the community.

A "policy" is more like the "No software/equipment recommendations questions" on the big SE sites. I'd hate to see something here like, "I detect a rant, you're outta here! Question closed!"

That said, we definitely need some strong tools and guidance for this. It would be great to be able to put questions On Hold for reasons that link to a very helpful guide with sections like:

Nothing alienates a user like having a question Closed when he just needed a chance to edit it.

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    I agree with this. We should look hard to find a good underlying question but also edit hard to strip the question of distracting and irrelevant material. Both of those would help the asker out.
    – user248
    Jun 11, 2015 at 14:52
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    The problem is many questions need extensive details to provide the needed information to get a valid answer. When users give this detail to a question other users jump on it as being a rant or being to targeted to a person situation. The problem with law is that there are circumstantial evidence that sets one person as guilty and another as innocent or even as a victim. This hinders the ability to get valid answers to a question when they are forced to reduce the question to a point of being so vague they end up getting an answer that no longer fits the original question.
    – mepatuhoo
    Jun 15, 2015 at 21:24
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    @PatrickW.McMahon There is a difference between providing necessary details and declaring something a "gross miscarriage of justice" or a "legal absurdity". Nobody has suggested removing necessary facts from a question.
    – user248
    Jun 15, 2015 at 21:47
  • @nomen agentis but how would you identify one from the other. It's not like talking to some one. Text removes a lot of the unspoken data. There is now way of telling how some one is saying something and the context of what they imply by a question and or statement.
    – mepatuhoo
    Jun 15, 2015 at 21:53
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    @PatrickW.McMahon I'd judge based on first impression. If first impression isn't clear, then I'd give the asker the benefit of the doubt. We're not going to be mean about it. Edits would be for the purpose of helping the asker get a good answer. Also, if you aren't good at telling a rant from a non-rant, then don't worry about it... you don't have to do anything.
    – user248
    Jun 15, 2015 at 22:04
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Since it's not clear exactly what information the question is asking for, it can already be closed as "unclear what you're asking"

You can also make the case that it can be closed as "too broad" since the answerer would have to inject their own hypothetical "conditions", and there is an unbound number of conditions that they could make an answer for.

SE in general has a custom against dead weight noise in your question. Ia question doesn't have these problems, but contains a rant and nothing in the rant is useful, you can edit the rant out.

There's no need to make extra policies to cover issues that are already covered by existing policies. It just makes our policy in general more clunky.

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