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Not too long ago, I reached the reputation level necessary to access the Close Votes review queue. This has been a rewarding journey so far; one of the things that puzzled me is the prevalence of questions where we (the Travel Stack Exchange community) are asked to 'predict' what a certain authority would do in a certain situation (most often, but not always pertaining to visas). Examples:

For more examples of questions recently closed as 'primarily opinion-based', see this SEDE query.

While I generally agree about closing these kind of questions, I'm not sure if this is really a matter of opinion. I'm wondering if it makes sense to add another off-topic reason boiling down to "we're not Customer Service for authority/company X", like Stack Overflow does.

Closing as primarily opinion-based might be confusing to new readers ("How can this be an opinion based question? They will either get their visa approved or declined.") and it provides the option to link to an extensive meta post which could explain why we do not allow these questions and what other resources are available for the author. We already do that for the other three off-topic reasons:

(I am aware that the ♦ moderator interface doesn't allow adding more than three boilerplate off-topic reasons. Still, quite a few Stack Exchange sites have done so in the past when the need arose).

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  • Interesting to know that up to 5 options are possible. However I'm not sure if Primarily opinion based isn't sufficient enough in this case.
    – JonathanReez Mod
    Commented Jun 28, 2019 at 22:45
  • I should have added some more information about why I think primarily opinion based is suboptimal, but I wasn't thinking clearly yesterday evening ... Now I did.
    – Glorfindel
    Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 7:24
  • Looks like a good plan but I do not have enough knowledge of the site to know how to activate it.
    – Willeke Mod
    Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 13:16
  • A request for a fourth off-topic reason would need to go through a Community Manager.
    – Glorfindel
    Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 13:25
  • Some careful drafting would be needed to avoid such a new close reason sounding overbroad. There are also plenty of questions that are phrased as "what would authority X do", but which don't really ask us to predict a case-by-case judgment and can be fully and objectively answered by explaining what the rules are.
    – hmakholm left over Monica
    Commented Jul 1, 2019 at 21:18

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I think "primarily opinion-based" is fine. For these kinds of questions, nobody who posts here knows the actual answer so anyone who answers is just posting an opinion.

If the asker finds this confusing, they can ask about it in a comment.

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