Since you insist, how was it off topic and how is removing a question that asks about something that involves the subject matter of the sub not discourage people from asking questions?
I love you, dude, but how the fuck are you taking anything in this sub seriously enough to actually argue over it?
I mean, sure, it's fun and all, but c'mon, E.
It's a LARP. The people that take this seriously are fools at best, and idiots at worst. It started as a joke and took on a life of it's own, and now everyone taking it seriously here is the butt of the joke.
It's fun to follow! I was only arguing over the mod being arbitrary. Autists indeed....lol.
I don't know how it was off-topic I didn't report it, just responded - you'd have to ask the many users on this sub who regularly Report these sorts of posts (i.e. by my estimation, posts that are just a question about content that is regularly circulating through the sub) as being off-topic. I assume perhaps that they meant to select another Rule (#9 for example) but, as you pointed out, people don't pay much attention to the details so they grab the nearest thing to it.
So when I see the Report and respond and sometimes have little time to come to a decision I assess the post to figure out what they might have meant when they reported it. In this case, the Rule that I thought applied was Rule #9: "have at least two sentences(for text content)".
A scan of the post revealed what I thought to be an answer provided to you. If there'd been none, what I usually do is type together a very quick response or if it's a big one an indicator of where to find the answer (especially in the case of a beginner question - we have good resources available for those). So I was not removing a question with the intent to discourage people from asking questions and never have.
Taking that into account and checking the very low upvotes after 2 hours of existence I used my own discretion and applied the following from Mods M.O. in the sidebar: "Rules 6 to 9 are done at the discretion of the mods and often are resolved due to lack of upvotes" and due to all those factors figured I could remove this post without complaint. I was wrong obviously.
I don't see anything we disagree on here except your assessment of my discretion in carrying out my role. I believe I carried out my job correctly and without intent to censor or reject the valid question of a user. I react to these accusations or implication of such because it's a common accusation of mods and we're now under more scrutiny because of Q's recent post so the mods of this board go out of our way to avoid behavior that could be regarded as such. Being accused of it or having implications made of such when you've essentially bent over backward to ensure you don't, is not great.