Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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What is required for a question to contain "enough information"?
This is the question edition of What is required for an answer to be high quality?
One of the key problems that I see Software Recommendations having, is people asking extremely vague and simple ...
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What is required for an answer to be high quality?
This is the answer edition of What is required for a question to contain "enough information"?
As a continuation of the above, the second key problem that I see Software Recommendations ...
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You're doing it all wrong!
Before this proposal went into beta, Tim Post laid out some ground rules on Area 51. If you haven't read them yet, I strongly encourage you to do so. The problem, a lot of you guys aren't following ...
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Can I ask for recommended websites?
I may want to ask for websites where I can find recommended music the way IMDB is a good site for Movie information.
Or I want a website where I can read Firefox OS news, in a similar format to OMG! ...
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Is "tool X versus tool Y" an on-topic question?
Can I ask the pros and cons between 2 programs on SR? Example: I have used Open Office for the longest time for my free word processor. I am interested in trying LibreOffice. Why should I change? ...
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Is it alright to ask for programming tools?
I am asking if it will be alright on this site to ask questions, such as "what is the best library for image rendering in C#?", or similar questions.
I understand that this website is for software ...
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How to ask and answer software recommendation questions - aka 'The Ground Rules'
This post should not be linked to as guidelines for post quality. It is from the Area 51 days and is not kept updated with policy changes.
If you're asking a question, please refer to What is ...
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How to ask for an alternative to some software
I have software X and I like it. However, I want an extra feature that X doesn't provide. Or I want to run X on a different platform. How can I ask for an alternative to X?
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Tags for free software and free software?
The tags free, freeware, open-source, floss have popped up.
free is dangerously close to being a meta tag. In the world of software, free can mean two very different things: “free as in free beer” (i....
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What to do when an answer contains several suggestions?
The answer to this question (since deleted) gives 4 suggestions as a single answer: (click for full-sized version)
I think suggestion4 is great and suggestion1 is crap, but I can't express it by ...
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Are hosting recommendation requests on-topic?
I just saw this question: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/1718/looking-for-hosting-for-laravel
It's asking for a hosting recommendation. Are these on topic here?
user46
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How are we going to moderate answers?
Everyone has already agreed if this site is going to work we need to have really high quality questions and answers (especially the answers).
This leads to the question, how are we going to ...
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Is it acceptable to use 'best' in a question?
Obviously, a question like "What is the best Linux distro" is just BAD in every way, but if it is a narrower question ( like "What is the best Linux distro for everyday use on my old G4 PowerBook" ), ...
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"Feature tags" only for required or also for optional features?
Should "feature tags" (is there a better name?) like OS (linux, osx, windows, …), license (open-source), and costs (free) only be used if they are required features?
Or may they also be used for ...
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Are video game related questions on topic?
When it comes to video games, some people that I know personally don't consider them as software while I do and game recommendations are off topic on Arqade. Assuming that a user posts a detailed ...
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Recent proliferation of "How to code?" questions & SuperUser questions
Is it just me or have the last few weeks seen a huge upsurge in people asking how they should design software , how they should code it, showing us their code and asking us to fix it?
There also seem ...
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How to deal with similar but not duplicate questions
For example this two cases listed below are different questions but same answers may apply and actually answer both questions.
Is there an alternative software for Adobe Photoshop
Lightroom?
Photo ...
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Impossible/impractical requests?
Program to search EULA contracts for problems asks for something that appears to me to be well beyond the state of the art. (If not, you can supply an answer).
I think it reasonable to "require" ...
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Should we disable the Roomba?
Roomba is a StackExchange-wide process that automatically deletes (among others) questions that fit these criteria:
more than 365 days old
has a score of 0, or a score of 1 in case of deleted owner
...
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Should we allow questions asking for software cracker, patcher or keygens?
Should we allow questions which ask for software product license/key generators, activators, patches or cracker? And why?
Question would be of the sort say
I'm using X, version Y on OS Z. I want to ...
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Are web service recommendations off-topic?
Online storage service with 15GB that works well on Linux
In my opinion, this is not off-topic, as it specifically requests for service with Linux (software) support.
Self-hosted collaborative real-...
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Make sure your questions don't get deleted silently: beware of Roomba!
Just a word of warning, as this SE is now over 1-year old: if you asked a question that is 1-year old, has no answer, didn't get any upvote and has at most 1 comment, Roomba will delete it without ...
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Is asking for sample, illustrative code on-topic?
Would a question asking primarily for sample code (to be studied for comprehension, and possibly reused), rather than for a working program or library, be on-topic?
On the one hand, asking for sample ...
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Congratulations! Software Recommendations is graduating!
It's a big day. You've been cleared for graduation by the Stack Exchange Community Team! Software Recommendations recently met our threshold for graduation-worthy sites and after a review, the ...
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Is software identification on-topic?
(I thought that we had a similar discussion, but couldn’t find it.)
Are software identification questions on-topic?
I.e., questions where the OP is not looking for options/alternatives, but for a ...
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Advertising on Super User (2014)
Super User offers free advertising under certain conditions.
Let's leverage that, in 3 phases:
Run a contest below to design the best ad.
On June 6th, the best-voted answer will be posted to Super ...
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Custom close reasons for software recommendations
Due to the unique nature of Software Recommendations in comparison to the rest of the Stack Exchange network, I feel some discussion needs to go into the creation of close reasons specific to this ...
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Private beta cleanup: tag synonyms and tag merges [closed]
This post is for all tag synonyms and tag merges so that we don't end up filling the front page of meta with synonym and merge requests.
How to use this post
Post each requested tag synonym and tag ...
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Can we agree on a tagging guide?
I think we have three sets of tags on SR:
(Please note that I don’t have good headlines for describing these groups as I’m not a native speaker; I hope the example tags make it clear, and please ...
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Are questions about browser plugins acceptable?
I feel the answer is YES, asking for confidence and Meta completeness.
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Is it okay to ask for alternatives? [duplicate]
For the sake of making an example that's easy to understand: If I were a Java w/ Spring developer using Eclipse, would the following question be acceptable?
What's an alternative to Eclipse for ...
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90 days have past, how do our statistics look?
90 days have past, and Software Recommendations is proving very useful (at least to me), but what do our statistics say? Statistics are watched closely by our overlords, so even though it is only ...
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Are hardware recommendations on-topic?
This site was established as a software recommendations site.
However, we do not have to define our scope based on historical happenstance in choosing a name.
Given that our primary focus is on ...
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A call to arms: review these answers!
Answers of this site are of very disparate quality. We have a lot of bad answers; some have already been improved or removed, but others are lingering.
We're in the process of determining what to do ...
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How specific should the OS tag be?
What if I ask for a software running on Windows.
For instance I use Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium.
That means I could run almost any software since Windows 95. How should I tag my question? Just [...
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My instincts are all wrong
Anyone else finding that their instincts on what is a good question are wrong?
Since questions that are off topic, on any other SE site are on topic here.
Ie any software-rec.
and questions that are ...
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Is it OK to recommend in comments?
We should only recommend software we actually used ourselfs to make sure we know what we are talking about.
It is ok to recommend a tool we did not use in a comment like here or even recommend a ...
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Are "What are criteria for X" on-topic
"What is the best linux distribution" is a bad question (opinion based).
"What are criteria for linux distributions" or
"How do I decide which linux distro I want?" can be good questions as the ...
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Would plugin recommendations about Minecraft be on topic?
So for example "Plugin for Bukkit that will rollback changes on a Minecraft server" or "Plugin for Bukkit that will
So long as the question is specific in what plugin the user is looking for, I don'...
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Is it OK to ask for a software having a particular feature?
I saw some questions being put on hold as too broad because they ask for just a particular feature. How many features must the OP mention in the question? Is it OK to ask for a software having a ...
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Should we have tags for separate Linux distributions?
I'm going through the Suggested Edit queue, and I'm seeing a lot of removals of the ubuntu tag. This question is one example. Since the asker is specifically asking for something for Ubuntu,
I feel ...
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Nominate temporary moderators for this site here
The provisional moderators were appointed. For more information, see here: Pro Tem Moderators... Activate
How do you become a provisional moderator for this site?
Soon after the site launches into "...
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Is recommending operating systems allowed on this site?
Some voted to close Desktop Linux distribution with the latest GNOME 3? with the following reason:
This question appears to be off-topic because it is about a Linux distribution and not about ...
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Is offerring to write a program for someone spam?
(Related to and inspired by this question)
In the post that I linked above it seems pretty well established that "There is no currently existing software that fulfills your request", possibly ...
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Are recommendations for programming tutorials/resources on topic?
Normally I would take programming questions to Stack Overflow, but I believe they're starkly against recommendations in most cases. However, I feel that asking for programming tutorials or resources ...
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Are web API recommendations on-topic?
In the past I have had mixed success asking for web APIs on other Stack Exchange sites. I think I've tried Stack Overflow and Web Apps, but I'm not 100% sure.
Web APIs seem to be much like libraries ...
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Asking for software, get libraries in answers
Is it acceptable to answer questions asking for software with libraries that will do most of what the OP is looking for, but would require some code to be written to utilize?
The OP can of course ...
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Acceptable to ask → build → self-answer a question for open source?
OK. This already has been somewhat covered in Should we be transparent when recommending our own software? and What are the rules for self-answering your question?, but there's a possible exception ...
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Is the proportion of unanswered questions a concern?
Of the almost 500 questions, well over 100 questions are unanswered - that seems like a worrying statistic - is it of concern?
user722
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My question was closed as too broad, why?
I asked a question with some specifics characteristics I'm looking, but was closed as too broad, why?
Here is my question:
Image editor that can draw a line
Must be able to draw a line.
...
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