Let's take a moment here and realize something.
"List question" is basically a loaded buzzword. There is no proper construct, nor are these questions inherently a bad fit for our engine.
There's a very wide misconception spread by this term which causes any and every question which has multiple answers, especially that they may form a list of more than 2 items, to be condemned as this horrible thing called a "list question". It's partially rooted in the idea of there needing to be a single definitive answer to any question. Neither of these are actual things. Being a list isn't a problem in itself. And the realization of this fact is that while there are a specific kind of problematic list (itemized lists, which were the subject of a number of our blog posts), you can often transform these into a non-problematic sort of list with a little effort.
Let's look at the question that brought this up, "What are some ways mass changing of terrain in a short period of time could occur?" The asker clarifies that the time frame is a matter of weeks-to-months, that the terrain change is something along the lines of a brand new mountain or islands splitting off, and that natural phenomena rather than wizard-did-it solutions are being sought. This is like many things that just happen to ask for a list - the ultimate goal is to find a single solution to be used, and it solicits multiple solutions in order to find the best one.
I want to take a moment right here, to point out that asking about a problem to solicit multiple solutions in order to find the best one for my purposes is literally one of the major points of existence for Q&A sites like ours. That there are multiple valid answers is not a problem, and we naturally have the ability to support this kind of system. The way it plays out is simple, we'll first start off by accruing the most commonly known means of mass terrain reformation. Some users will post multiples of these within one answer - that makes for a stronger answer than someone who only proposed one, so that kind of answer probably gets more votes. But someone could suggest a rather esoteric means that not many people are familiar with, and fleshes it out with paragraphs of reasoning. That too would be pretty strong.
What makes this acceptable is the scope. And let's not confuse this for some kind of "Oh if there are fewer than 10 possible answers it is good", there's no such thing of numbers here. It's about what kind of scope makes logical sense for a question to contain enough information without being too broad or too narrow to be useful?, and I find that something like "Natural phenomena that would cause mass land reformation over a relatively short period of time" is actually pretty useful. This isn't a rare kind of construct to use in world-building, sometimes you just gotta have a new mountain, yanno? You can see this as a simple contained system that is being sought out. This isn't acceptable because "Oh there's only so many possible natural phenomena", even if that is a reality. It's acceptable because the problem space that is being asked about is very reasonable to us as world builders.
It's all about changing how you look at it. What is at surface phrasing "Give me a list of mass land reformations", is at heart "How could I go about causing a mass land reformation in a period of weeks to months?", that's a single problem. That's the key here, it's isolating what problem is being asked, and then you judge the validity of the question based on that problem. If the problem's scope is improperly sized or is otherwise unfit for the site, that makes it a poor question, not the fact that the question requests a list of items.
A problem's scope would be improperly sized if, for example, if I asked (probably on Chemistry more than here) for a list of how every chemical element reacted with water in its purest state - there may be a finite number of elements but the list is unwieldy. I'm either trying to find a specific kind of reaction (to which I should've asked what kinds of elements produce said reaction), trying to find what kind of reactions there are (to which I should've asked what common reactions there are) or I'm trying to scout for outliers in the mix (to which I should've asked about unusual reactions). And the latter case may be too speculative to be useful. In fact there's a lot of places in scope decision that are fraught with perils like that - too broad, too narrow, too speculative, too obscure, too contrived, too complex, too simple... there are degrees in many directions that can render the scope of a question not useful to actually helping people. And they're all a problem associated with the scope, not with the fact that there's a list being asked for.
If you see something that you'll instinctively call a List Question, think about what it's actually asking. Think to yourself what problem it's trying to solve, and whether you think it's a useful problem to solve, and that the scope of the problem is useful. It may sometimes need you to tinker with the question to make it more visibly appropriate, but remember that our best tool is our ability to work with each other as a community.
