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I'm thinking older questions that ask us to find a font that has no identifiable branding, such as this one, this one or today's one.

Since those questions have been answered and add no value to the site, should we get rid of them?

Should we create a big "How do I identify a font?" question that acts as the mother of all generic ones and allow us to mark them as duplicates? This big question would have all the available resources for identification. We could give new ones some time to get answered (first inviting OPs to visit the mega post), and then mark them as duplicates once they have been found?

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  • My opinion means little here, but I'm all for your megapost suggestion. [font-identification] is a brand of tag that I've watched with glee while it got burninated on other sites (like [identify-this-game] on Arqade.
    – hairboat Staff
    Commented Mar 6, 2014 at 4:45
  • I'm all for it. There are a few font ID questions that are extremely pointless with little to no reusable value, in particular the ones identifying Arial. The only question is how do we distinguish between the ones that should be doops and the ones that shouldn't?
    – Dom
    Commented Mar 6, 2014 at 11:18

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Nope! (And not just because I'd stand to lose some rep :P)

Back when Typophile was more of a thing, it was associated in my mind as "a place where people could ID fonts." Now, GD.SE is that place for me.

Does a question have to have reusable value to be worthwhile? Such questions carve out a niche for the site and give people a reason to come here; surely that's worth some kind of value. In other words, while a vague, answered question doesn't have much value, the fact that such questions are allowed brings value (and, in my opinion, certainly doesn't hurt the site). IDing fonts is fun for some and really helpful for the typographically uninitiated.

I'm okay with a megapost, but a lot of times people post because that stuff doesn't make sense to them anyways or those services simply aren't 100% reliable.

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  • Interesting! Although if a question gets marked as duplicate it still exists. But I'm not sure for how long, I'll take a look and come back with more info.
    – Yisela Mod
    Commented Mar 6, 2014 at 20:04
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    I don't think Yisela means take them out of the scope, they will still be perfectly on topic and not closed, just once an answer has been found we can file them out of the way. Also, it would probably block new answers and commenting; which on accepted-answer font ID questions is more of a positive.
    – Dom
    Commented Mar 6, 2014 at 20:15
  • I, too, loved typophile, but one if its downfalls, IMHO, is that it turned into 90% "Please ID this font for me" and drowned out the broader conversations. Not saying that's an issue here, but just to clarify one of the problems over there.
    – DA01
    Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 6:12
  • @DA01 - I certainly wouldn't want font ID to become GD's "thing." But if anything, that proves that there is demand for such a thing. Do you think that SE's ignore tags feature is enough to compensate, or do you think that a stream of font ID would deter people who don't know about/don't use that feature? (This isn't meant to be a "question that's not really a question"; I like font ID, but if people genuinely think it could kill the site that's good for me to know!)
    – Brendan
    Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 22:21
  • @Brendan honestly, I don't know if I have a strong opinion on that. I didn't like Typophile becoming that, but there were a lot of other issues there as well, so don't know that I can blame font ID as the primary downfall.
    – DA01
    Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 4:31

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