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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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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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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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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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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An odd request: can we have another week in private beta?
If the Community Managers team (henceforth CM) so decides, we're scheduled to start public beta in two days (Tuesday). I'm not sure we're ready.
On most new beta sites, announcements from the CM team ...
user46
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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 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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New Site Design!
As you can see the new design just went live. Congratulations! Thank you for your valuable design feedback.
We have also themed the twitter account and newsletter template for this site, and adjusted ...
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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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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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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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Software Recommendations New Site Design
My name is Paweł, I’m a product designer at Stack Exchange. I’m super happy for you, because the process of graduation is about to be concluded! Congratulations to all of you!
New Design
The new ...
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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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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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Software Recommendations Stack Exchange - Top User Swag!
We want to congratulate and thank everyone that helped this site and community grow healthily into what they are today!
If you can find your name among the top 72 users in the first two pages here, ...
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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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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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Are we becoming lax about answer quality?
I'm concerned.
Overall, I think we're doing great. We get more questions per day than all but 8 beta sites, we have awesome users with tons of reputation that help out, and we have a pretty decent ...
user46
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Pro Tem Moderators... Activate
I will be contacting additional users to fill more moderator slots, but I wanted to get the folks below activated before things really started to take off.
Throughout the beta, we need members from ...
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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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Haaaaaaaaaaaats
Seeing as people want hats, we're signed up for hats. Yay! Visit winterbash2014.stackexchange.com starting December 15 for hat awesomeness.
If you absolutely hate hats, there'll be a button in the ...
user46
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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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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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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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How can I escape from this site?
I recently spent a great deal of time formulating a question that I really want an answer to. What I'm hoping to find is software, preferably on Linux, preferably Ubuntu, to solve a problem related to ...
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Design Ideas for this site. Again
My name is Paweł, I'm Senior Product Designer from StackOverflow and I'm going to work on your site's design and I need your help.
Right now I'm in the "research stage" which basically means that I'...
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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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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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How can we better reach experts?
There was some chatter in our mod room about the answer rate, currently at 58%. I've made the argument before that such a low number is natural, and even good, for a site like this:
% Answered
I ...
user46
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Should questions always state whether the requirement must be native/webapp?
I get the feeling if someone says "I want a cross platform app that does X", my stock response is often going to be "webapp, dude". I also suspect many people may find that annoying, and only consider ...
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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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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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How should we vote on good answers with (in my opinion) bad recommendations?
I have been meaning to ask this question ever since the private beta started, but now a good example came up.
In this question I have posted an answer myself and Bernhard has posted an answer ...
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2015 Community Moderator Election Results
Software Recommendations's first moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 3 new moderators are:
They'll be replacing the existing crew shortly — please thank ...
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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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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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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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Should programming language recommendations be allowed here?
Should recommendations for which programming language to use be allowed on the site? For example, a few off the top of my head:
What programming language to use for a desktop application involving [...
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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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Should titles actually be a question?
I am genuinely curious, but this is my second beta and one thing I have noticed is the first edit that people make to questions is make the title into a question.
For example, the title of my 2nd ...
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Is LeadTools spamming?
It seems there are a lot of answers to old questions which I personally consider spam according the definition "only exists to promote a product". Some of them my question, which is why I ...
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How should we flag answers?
Let's prefix this with this: I'm quite new to all of this. I've been on mSO for almost a year now, and I know the normal ropes, but this site is a brand new category for SE. We have some work to do.
...
user46
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What's our stance on being a migration target?
Now that we're graduating, we're eligible to appear on other sites' migration lists, such as this one (from Stack Overflow):
If we were on this list, it would mean that normal users with close ...
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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Forward Thinking Systems: spam or not?
This question has a few particularities that might be interpreted as signs of spam:
https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/11467
Both asker and answerer have created their Software ...
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Is the question “JS/PHP editor software” acceptable?
The question Cross platform JS/PHP editor software with FTP support and code hinting has been closed twice, reopened, and is well into process toward being closed again.
Looking around the site, I ...
user23
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Advertising on Super User (2015)
I just posted our advertisement to Super User:
https://meta.superuser.com/a/8079/22536
Please upvote it so that it reaches the required threshold of 6 votes to get displayed, thanks!
The ad itself ...
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What should our chatroom be named?
Our lovely chatroom is currently sitting there with a terribly generic name: Software Recommendations.
What should we name it?
user46
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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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