28
votes
Accepted
17
votes
Accepted
Are how-to's on-topic?
A question asking how to accomplish a task with some specific software, as opposed to looking for some software to accomplish that task, would be off-topic. Such questions would typically be on-topic ...
17
votes
Accepted
Answer to duplicate question no longer relevant once merged
This was completely my fault, I should have seen that. A community manager has unmerged it. Thanks for reporting it!
And I'll be a whole lot more careful in the future. Much like Santa, checking ...
- 4,235
17
votes
When will we graduate?
Our Area 51 stats look fairly decent, but they're mostly a red herring in this sort of thing. If they're all red, we need to sit up and take notice, but having all/most of them green doesn't mean we'...
- 4,235
17
votes
16
votes
What is required for a "there is no such program" answer to be high quality?
To give such an answer, either you must be pretty profient in that area to be sure – or the question must be a "little stupid". In both cases, an answer should not be limited to "there is no such ...
IzzyMod
- 18.5k
16
votes
Congratulations! Software Recommendations is graduating!
Wonderful! Well done everyone :-)
Most people expected us to fail. It is historical, we have proved that recommendations can work on Stack Exchange if done right. I hope Open Data will follow that ...
- 18.8k
15
votes
How to behave while trying out recommendations
Well, it's pretty normal that testing recommended solutions is not done "ad-hoc". On some SE sites, I've marked questions accepted several months after they've been given: if evaluation takes time, it ...
IzzyMod
- 18.5k
14
votes
Congratulations! Software Recommendations is graduating!
I'd like to extend a huge thank you to the community and my fellow moderators, with special thanks to the prolific flaggers out there - you know who you are. Together we've deleted more than 700 posts,...
- 4,235
13
votes
Bounty expired, no answers, but I still lost my bounty points?
Yep, this is how it's supposed to work. See the privilege page for bounties:
Bounties expire after seven days. You will receive several notifications a few days before this happens.
If you do not ...
- 4,235
13
votes
Are we becoming lax about answer quality?
I think you are totally right.
I tend to downvote such answers, I will go over to flag them as well (as VLQ as suggested by Gilles).
Usually I care more about questions then answers so I didn't ...
- 3,020
12
votes
Accepted
Is it acceptable to add an answer to an old/solved question with a newer (hopefully better) solution?
Absolutely. If its a distinct, great answer post it anyway.
If its a new feature on an existing product in an answer consider commenting or editing it to update the answer.
Don't forget that ...
- 8,127
12
votes
Accepted
Forward Thinking Systems: spam or not?
Looks like a sockpuppet to me. I've deleted the question, suspended and warned the parent user, and destroyed the sock puppet. The bounty was a 'very' nice touch, if not for the fact that it was very ...
- 8,127
12
votes
Accepted
Found a copy of an answer here on another site. Are they copying SE? Is it legal?
Looking at this more (and reading the comments below), these are missing the required author attribution - links to the author's profile. It should be reported as described in A site (or scraper) is ...
- 4,235
12
votes
Long-time spammer happens to be on-topic. Delete or not?
Vote/flag based on the content, not on the user. If people are downvoting or flagging this because of who posted, that is user targeting, which is against the rules on Stack Exchange sites.
If the ...
- 131
12
votes
2018 Community Moderator Election Results
Thank you to the community for voting me as your new moderator.
Many thanks to Undo for his great job as moderator and for helping to keep our community strong.
A special thank you to Journeyman ...
- 6,196
11
votes
Accepted
Can I ask if a particular software will fit my needs?
tl;dr: No, but you can make it on-topic.
It’s off-topic to ask if a specific software is suitable in a specific case. We want to answer with software recommendations, not with "yes" or "no".
But it’...
- 7,770
11
votes
Make sure your questions don't get deleted silently: beware of Roomba!
Soliciting votes in this manner goes against spirit of how we vet content, and we cannot allow this type of activity. While we encourage everyone to up-vote great posts, the motivation for doing so ...
- 150
11
votes
Accepted
Is suggesting built-in software acceptable?
In the past, this was done. And I don't see anything wrong with that – after all it's software "available", and in cases like that the user could even skip the download+install part.
But in your ...
IzzyMod
- 18.5k
11
votes
New Site Design!
Looks great Pawel!
Your design is:
Clear
Visually appealing
Simple
Easy to read
Reasonably friendly to people with limited eyesight
Works for people with all types of color blindness
Low bandwidth
...
- 6,196
11
votes
Including cloud-based services for software recommendations?
In my opinion, it makes sense that cloud-based software (SaaS) recommendations be on-topic on this Stack Exchange website.
- 36.9k
11
votes
Accepted
Is it allowed to request software that breaks a service's terms of service (TOS)?
We do not enforce agreements between third parties - and we shouldn't set that precedent.
You're free to downvote, comment, and refrain from answering, but it's unlikely that any moderation action ...
- 4,235
11
votes
Accepted
Are questions for service providers welcome at our site?
As stated in most of the above mentioned question implicitly or even half-was explicitly: SR is about recommending software, not providers/companies. So asking for a service provider (be it VPN, DNS, ...
IzzyMod
- 18.5k
11
votes
Accepted
Is LeadTools spamming?
Thank you for your meta post, Thomas.
I share your concerns.
I believe it is best, as a community, to openly and thoughtfully determine how to deal with this somewhat unique situation. By doing so, ...
- 6,196
10
votes
Accepted
Why did the % answered dropped from 74% to 63% yesterday?
There was a bug in the algorithm that calculates IsAnswered. That field is used to calculate the % answered value.
The bug is now gone as of two days ago:
I've updated the query to check for nulls on ...
- 4,235
10
votes
reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/
As a moderator - I'm fine with using them as a source, as long as the answers meet our quality guidelines. Nearly all my answers are from tools I have found around various parts of the internet. We do ...
- 8,127
10
votes
Accepted
Guide users who try to use the tag [free]
We got rid of the tag free because it is ambiguous: it could mean free (libre) software (i.e. open source, software that you can adopt and modify), or freeware (gratis software, i.e. software that the ...
10
votes
Where do questions about software development software belong to?
If you are looking for recommendations for software development tools and libraries, Software Recommendations is the right place. (Note that recommendations are off-topic on Stack Overflow and most of ...
- 7,770
10
votes
Accepted
Are recommendations for programming tutorials/resources on topic?
No, they are not.
While such content is valuable, it needs its own set of criteria for distinguishing good questions and good answers. We focus on stuff that can be executed on computers, "software", ...
- 3,020
10
votes
Small capital characters in posts
In my opinion, the small caps Unicode characters shouldn’t be used for normal text in our posts (unless, of course, it’s about these characters):
In the browser search (Ctrl + f, e.g., in Firefox and ...
- 7,770
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible