Should questions about LEGO events, themeparks and other things unrelated to building be allowed?

Question

I saw this question today about Legoland, which led to wonder whether such questions should be on-topic: Will it be fun to go to Legoland with my family?

I am 31 years old . My elder sister and mother are going to visit me. I want to see whether it is suitable to bring them to LegoLand. Thanks

The question strikes me as low-quality (it's subjective because different people enjoy different things, and very localized to one person's family situation). Besides that though, I'm not sure if it's on-topic, or whether it should be. The FAQ outlines the following as appropriate questions:

• Building techniques for a particular part of a model
• The history of The LEGO Group or elements
• Care and organisation of your bricks
• Techniques for getting the best out of your Mindstorms Robots
• Replicating advanced building techniques in CAD applications (i.e. LEGO Digital Designer or LDraw based applications)

This question is only tangentially related to Legos, as it asks about the Lego themepark. It's not at all about building, history, etc. though. Should we be allowing questions like this?

Answer 1

While I agree that the question is rather localised (especially with the "my family" element), I felt that the question had some broader merit - I know a few other AFOL's without the excuse of kids whose partners/family aren't interested in LEGO - and so answered the question from that interpretation.

We mod's had a brief chat about it, and I felt that it might get lost over at Travel.SE, and that it was just about on topic for here - perhaps the question could be reworded to:

Will non-LEGO fans have as much fun at LEGOland as me?

Which was the question I tried to answer.

Note that the list in the FAQ is introduced with "In general, if you have a question which covers", the list isn't exclusive, it's a guideline, and we've not explicitly excluded the topic in the list of things that are off-topic.

As you can see from the answers and comments over on Six sites due to be scrapped we've taken a fairly lenient approach to borderline questions - if they get traction (good or bad) from the other users we'll act accordingly - if you feel strongly that something doesn't fit then please flag it so we know what you think - we're Pro-tem moderators, so unlike voted mod's we don't really have a full mandate from the users to act with autonomy ;)

Answer 2

I think this is exactly the kind of question which in a general sense should be considered as off-topic (or too localized), but also for which if gets asked once in a while, doesn't pose any very serious problem.

At some point, we'll probably want to have one CW FAQ question about LEGOland parks (which are of interest to LEGO fans anyway), and point to it when closing other questions on that topic. But as long as we don't have one, I'd tend to leave these questions live. Notice that no one even voted to close it.

Answer 3

YES. This site is too niche not to.

Having been to LEGOLand (Florida) recently, I do not believe there to be that many possible questions regarding it, so I do not see the harm in allowing questions regarding it and tagging them with a LEGOLand tag.

Here are the types of questions I'd expect:

• Where are the Legoland parks?
• What is the difference between each Legoland park?
• What are the attractions at Legoland {name of location}?
• Where are the official Lego places to go and their differences? (Legolands, LEGO Stores, and LEGO Discovery Centers)
• What things can I do at LegoLand that I can't do at a LEGO Store or Discovery Center?
• What is there at the LEGO Centers (wrong name?), like the one in Chicago?
• What is the age range of visitors allowed at the LEGO centers? (note recent news article)

Heck, we can pre-answer some of this stuff and that would drive page views, visitors, etc.

Answer 4

In my view, some questions about theme parks are right on topic. For example, questions about the LEGO models would seem to be well within the scope of this site. These questions need not be considered too localized, as we can all see pictures / videos of the models even if we can't see them in person.

So, the following could be on-topic:

• What scale are the buildings at the theme parks?
• How do the model cars at the theme parks know where to go?
• Does LEGO use special colours / moulds for the bricks in the theme park models?

On the other hand, questions about rides and outlets would be outside the scope. The difference is that these questions aren't really about LEGO, but about attractions that happen to be LEGO-themed.

Of course, there are grey areas. We'll have to deal with these on their merits.

Answer 5

I think that while that question wasn't a good help for its own cause of adding that aspect to the site, an events/locales tag might be a fun addition, especially coupled with events questions related to LEGO. Bu we'll need more quality answers to be sure whether or not to green-light this.