On Stack Overflow there are a lot of questions about software recommendations that are closed as off-topic, but these questions would be on topic here. Some of them are too old to migrate. Is it ok to ask this questions again here?
2 Answers
No.
We want questions representing problems this community is actively trying to solve, presented within guidelines that this community establishes and adopts.
There's over 120 questions on the site right now, a lack of content is not a problem. What we need is content that meets the expectations of quality that this community sets out, and quite a bit of those old Stack Overflow questions (aside from being old and potentially irrelevant) fail to meet that bar.
It's useful though, because many of those questions illustrate precisely what we don't want in answers, and to some degree, questions. We want narrowly scoped questions to which only a few good answers would apply, and we want in-depth answers that really speak to the question, and the personal experience of the person writing the answers.
The typical one-link-per-answer that gets 60 up votes on Stack Overflow is precisely what we're trying to avoid here.
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2I know that most of these questions on SO are bad, but my question is if it's ok to ask a good, narrowly scoped questions that are already asked and closed on other SE-site Feb 5, 2014 at 10:57
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3@Dirty-flow Even then, we generally avoid moving old content over to new communities; we've found that it's better if your content comes exclusively from you. Now, is there a closed and unanswered great question on SO? Is it a problem you're facing too? Feel free to ask it here in your own way, so that this community can take ownership of it from the start.– Tim PostFeb 5, 2014 at 11:01
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@TimPost: Allow me for an OT. The reasons explained in the comment and the reasons explained in the answer are totally different. It happened to me many times on meta.*.stackexchange.com. I think one guideline which would be really useful is to avoid this phenomenon. The first reasons are more idealistic, but the real strong reason is the second. It's very similar to what describes Naomi Klein in her book it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_economy. I think SE should NEVER hide the real reasons behind idealogical reason.– ReviousFeb 5, 2014 at 20:41
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What you're seeing isn't an artifact of us hiding anything, but merely an artifact of me failing to write a more complete and better answer. I'll edit it a bit when I get back to my desk.– Tim PostFeb 5, 2014 at 20:53
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Can we migrate this question here? stackoverflow.com/questions/48992/what-are-the-best-svn-tools– ReviousFeb 7, 2014 at 17:19
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@Revious clearly not; it's 6 years old (violates norm against migrating old questions) and lacks a clear problem statement (violates Software Recs rules). Indeed, it lacks any problem statement at all - it just asks "list some random cool stuff related to SVN in some way, please!" Dec 24, 2014 at 17:04
If you (personally) had a Question closed on Stack Overflow because it asked for a Software Recommendation, and you still want an Answer, then yes, you can ask the same Question here.
Perhaps you will improve the Question, either based on the information given at SO, the passage of time, or your own further experience.
What you shouldn't do is try and recycle other people's closed SO questions. As @TimPost says, we want Quality, not Quantity.
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I often find software recommendation questions with well-written answers on Stack Overflow, but we still don't have an option to migrate them. Sep 10, 2020 at 20:06
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What about a question I didn't ask, but which I personally answered because I needed the same solution, so I researched and answered it? Dec 28, 2021 at 19:20
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@M.Justin: I'm not the best authority on what SoftRec policies are some seven years after posting above, but it's generally a StackExchange policy to avoid crossposts, esp. for Questions that are already successfully addressed on another site.– hardmathDec 28, 2021 at 20:00