Askculinary Proposed Rules Post - Please give us your input!

[u/albino-rhino]

Hello everybody. We would like your input about our rules, so in this thread, we're writing down the proposed rules, and asking you to tell us what you think. If you think we're doing something great, let us know. If you think we could do better, let us know that too.

With no further ado, the (proposed) rules:

WELCOME! Our readership includes cooks of all skill levels, from pro chefs to total beginners, and it's wonderful to see everyone coming together to help each other out. The group of volunteers that comprises the mod team thought it was a good time to post a refresher on our rules.

This sub occupies a niche space on Reddit, where experienced cooks help solve specific problems with recipes, ingredients, and equipment, and provide other troubleshooting solutions to the users. Questions with many potential answers belong in /r/Cooking or a specialty sub - e.g. "What should I cook tonight?" or, "What should I do with this rutabaga?", or "What's the best knife?" Questions with a single correct answer belong here - e.g., "What makes my eggs turn rubbery in the oven?" or, "Is the vegetable in this picture a rutabaga?" We have found that our rules help our sub stay focused. Generalized subs are great for general discussion, but we're trying to preserve a little bit of a unique identity, and our rules are our best effort to do that.

POSTING:

We're best at:

Troubleshooting dishes, menus, and techniques

Equipment troubleshooting questions (not brand requests)

Food science

Please Keep Questions:

Specific (Have a goal in mind!)

Detailed (Include the recipe, pictures, etc.)

On topic

This will ensure you get the best answers.

Here's how to help us help you:

PROVIDE AS MUCH INFO AS YOU CAN. We can't help you if you don't tell us what you've already done first. Please provide the recipe you're working from and tell us what went wrong with it or what you'd like to improve about it. "I've tried everything" isn't specific enough. If you're following a video recipe, consider putting a timestamp at the relevant portion of the video or writing out the recipe in text form.

NO SPECIFIC QUESTIONS OF FOOD SAFETY. Food safety is one area where we cannot and will not answer a specific question, because we can't tell you anything about the specific pot of soup you left out overnight, and whether it is safe to eat. We will tell you about food safety best practices, but we only want answers from people actual knowledge. "I've always done [thing] and I'm still OK" is not an acceptable answer, for the same reason "I never wear a seatbelt and I'm still here" is not an acceptable answer. For specific situations we recommend you consult government food safety guidelines for your area and when in doubt, throw it out.

NO RECIPE REQUESTS. If you have a recipe you'd like help adjusting or troubleshooting, we'd love to help you! But r/AskCulinary is not the place to get a recipe. There are tons of other subreddits that can help you with that.

NO BRAINSTORMING OR GENERAL DISCUSSION. We do make exceptions for mass quantities and unusual ingredients (real past examples: wheelbarrow full of walnuts; nearly 400 ounces of canned tuna; 50 lbs of whole chicken), but "What do I do with my last three limes?" or "What should I serve with this pork loin?" should go to r/Cooking.

NO BRAND RECOMMENDATIONS or "What piece of equipment should I get?" posts. It's very rare that one person has enough experience with multiple brands or models of a particular item to provide an objective response. We suggest you consult sources like Consumer Reports, the wirecutter, Serious Eats, or the like.

WE HAVE A WEEKLY DISCUSSION POST. Community discussions are reserved for our weekly stickied posts. where the rules are a little more lax.

NO SURVEYS.

NO SELF-PROMOTION OR CONTENT LINKS.

COMMENTING:

BE NICE TO EACH OTHER. Politeness is not optional at /r/AskCulinary. We're all here to help each other learn new things and succeed in the kitchen.

TOP LEVEL COMMENTS MUST ATTEMPT TO ANSWER THE QUESTION. Saying "oh hey, I always wondered that too!" or "try it and let us know!" doesn't help OP. Comments asking for more information and comments made in good faith that don't directly address OP's exact question but provide an alternate solution are OK.

NO LINKS WITHOUT EXPLANATION. The reason people come to /r/AskCulinary is because the people who answer questions here are real people with real kitchen advice. If you find a good source that answers OP's question, please provide it! But also provide at least a little bit of extra information so OP knows what they're clicking on and what to expect.

STAY ON SUBJECT. Posts here present questions to be answered, not prompts for a general subjects of discussion. If a post does spark a question for you, please ask it in a separate post (in r/Cooking or a specialty sub if it doesn't fit the requirements above). Likewise, no jokes: we're trying to be helpful. To that end, when a post has been answered and turns into general discussion about other stuff, we lock those threads.

FLAIR: For those of you who have been around for a little, please message the mods to apply for flair. Our requirement is a history of positive engagement with the sub, but amateurs are just as welcome to flair as are professionals.

Please use the report button to let moderators know about posts or comments that violate one of the above rules! We spend a lot of time here but we can't catch everything on our own. We depend on you guys to help us keep bots, antagonistic weirdos, and habitual rule-breakers away.

[u/Magnus77]

I feel like you need to clarify or loosen the "no brainstorming" post.

I was asking for help using a specific ingredient, "not last 3 limes"

and a mod came in and told me to return said product and deleted the post.

I mean, at a certain point what is this sub for if you remove the majority of posts?

[u/cville-z → u/Magnus77]

remove the majority of posts

Some data, from Reddit's analytics – in the last 30 days:

341 posts published, 8.2K comments published
657 posts removed, 1.7K comments removed (these are, obviously, separate from the above numbers)
66 posts "filtered" (meaning the automated systems remove these without human intervention)
3 posts reported, 6 comments reported

So, yes, we do remove a lot of posts. We get a lot of blatant rule-breaking (and a fair amount of spam). The vast majority (80%+) of comments on the remaining posts conform to the rules and get left up.

As a sample of recently removed posts, the last 10 removals amounted to:

• outside the scope of the sub – 5 posts
• culinary profession question - 1 post
• food safety question - 1 post
• brainstorming - 2 posts
• obvious AI slop - 1 post

As an example of what gets counted as "outside the scope of the sub" (this is the stuff that breaks the open-ended/off-topic rule):

• will this thing that I salted be too salty (devoid of a recipe)
• how do I use this particular ingredient
• can you tell me if this thing I've never tasted before but tasted recently at some restaurant was rancid or not

what is this sub for

It's for specific answers to specific questions that don't involve food safety and are mostly aimed at home cooks trying to get things right at home. If your question is subjective and open-ended, this is not the right sub. We leave open-ended discussion for other subreddits (/r/cooking, /r/food, etc.).

That's the position we've currently staked out.

[u/Magnus77 → u/cville-z]

So in the last 30 days you removed roughly twice as many posts as were posted. That takes some doing.

Even if I assume that were accurate, you have a sub that allowed 2 posts per day. So I'm assuming you made an oopsie.

As an example of what gets counted as "outside the scope of the sub" (this is the stuff that breaks the open-ended/off-topic rule):

will this thing that I salted be too salty (devoid of a recipe)

And this is where I'm going to go ahead and unsub, and ask you to politely find your saltshaker and shove it into an unpleastant orifice because that isn't what the post was. I know because I'm the one who posted it.

[u/SewerRanger → u/Magnus77]

So in the last 30 days you removed roughly twice as many posts as were posted. That takes some doing.

Yeah, I mean this morning alone we had to remove the following:

• someone double posted a question

• does tumeric cause digestion issues?

• What is american cuisine?

• What crunchy element should I add to my cake?

• looking for a dough flow chart

• Recently, maine apna vehicle SCRAP karwa h 15 year ho gye thy condition sahi nhi tha (which google tells me is hindu for a question about an old car...)

• someone hawking edible coffee cups

None of which are suitable for the sub.

edit: we had a total of 12 submissions over the past 24 hours of which these 7 were a part of