The Can you name the place in the photograph game? thread has been running for 2 years and 10 months. In that time, we've posted nearly 8000 posts, with exactly half a gazillion photos (I counted them). 
The number of participants has dropped somewhat, though, and there are some rough edges in communication and recurring bad feelings, which sadly have not all been sanded off over time. Talking over the issue in private message (thanks for the input!), I thought it might be beneficial to have a separate thread from the main game to hash out some things, to see if we could form any broad consensus on what we want the game to be (wrt rules and behaviour), and hopefully move forward in a friendlier spirit, or at least gain some understanding for different viewpoints. A lot of this will be in the realm of current unwritten rules, which different people might have different views on?
Rules for this thread
- Assume good faith
- No accusations
(If you must say "I think X is doing bad thing", say it to their face in private message, with the full understanding that it's impossible for them to prove a negative. In public, no good can come of such an accusation, and I can only rule it as inflammatory.)
My role here: I'm the moderator for the Travel Photography forum. That means my purpose here is making certain the spirit of the forum rules is adhered to. Specifically: "We want this forum to be a pleasant place for all our users". This is where we seem to be failing somewhat with the game, and where I hope that talking about it can improve matters. (I'm also a sometimes participant in the thread, and have personal feelings about when the game is fun and when it isn't. I might share some of those in a separate post, clearly labeled as personal opinion, but ultimately my moderator hat takes precedence, and I don't really care what the ultimate consensus - if any - turns out to be.)
As a moderator, I care about the wider forum. I don't care about the game. The game is not the point of the forum. Adhering to any community consensus on rules and behaviour for the game is up to all participants individually, and I will not be enforcing it. I will however be enforcing the forum rules.
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Some starting subjects to share your opinion on. Feel free to add others.
Tool use: The elephant in the room. For many, many locations in the world, technology makes it trivially easy to find the location through a photo, but regular image search based on textual input can also be very powerful. There is no reward for guessing right, only the burden of having to find yet another photo. Yet there might be imagined admiration for how well traveled you are if you guess many photos? Or does the knowledge of the existence of the tools take that away?
Research: If you don't recognize the location, what level of research is okay? Using which tools? What's the point of researching at all?
Time: How swiftly "should" the thread move? How long "should" you wait before you add more clues? And as a participant, how long "should" you wait before you research things? Should there be a point where the conclusion is "too hard, I'll put up a different location / someone else should have a turn"? Is that preferable over research being necessary?
Hardness: If you look back to the early pages of the thread, most photos were very recognizable to anyone who'd been to the location, and guessed very swiftly, only sometimes needing a second photo clue. Later on, they started getting obscure, both because most widely visited places had been done already, because participants started posting more-or-less "misleading" initial photos or photos of obscure details from popular locations, or simply because of running out of good photos for the game. Nowadays it feels like most locations need 10+ photos and many textual clues. What is okay here? What do we like? Is there a relation to reduced participation? (If anyone not currently participating is reading along and wants to chime in, please do!)
Outside help: If someone knows the location but doesn't want to take a turn, should they give hints?
Meta: What is actually the value in the thread? Is it the challenge of guessing the location? Is it learning about new and interesting locations which you might want to visit yourself? Is it seeing pretty pictures?
This thread has been moved to the Off Topic forum. Go to the new (meta) Community consensus on "Can you name the place thread.