34
"what is the best library for image rendering in C#?"
Would be a horrible question because it is completely unclear what you're looking for. A particular image rendering library might be perfect for one person's needs and useless to the proverbial next man.
However, if you list the exact features you need and a few more details, this would a perfectly ...
26
I agree with the general sentiment, but not with all your recommendations.
How does it meet the needs of the asker? Don't just say "it has these features" or "it meets all of your needs" - who cares? Describe the features in more detail.
Yes, definitely.
Why do you, personally, like the product? What other niche features does it have ...
answered Feb 6 '14 at 12:09
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
4,8081 gold badge21 silver badges54 bronze badges
24
I don't see why web services would be off-topic.
This is a software recommendation site. Whether the software runs on your phone, on your laptop, on your home server, on your rented cloud instance, on your company server or on someone else's servers doesn't change the on-topicness of the question.
Hosting, however, is off-topic. For a web service:
“which ...
answered Feb 5 '14 at 0:30
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
4,8081 gold badge21 silver badges54 bronze badges
22
No, this is not a valid question.
Why you should switch or not can only you decide. And if you seek a recommendation you need to be very specific what you need from that really big software solution and why you consider switching in the first place.
Do you have requirements your current software does not fulfill? Name them. Be specific.
21
I believe that we should treat these questions just like we would any others. They aren't really special, and jailbreaking/rooting is not illegal (at least in the US). I don't see a need to make a special case for these.
We aren't really in a position to judge the legality of a motive. That's the job of posters, not us.
19
Indeed, a Linux distribution is software.
“This question appears to be off-topic because it is about a Linux distribution and not about software” doesn't make sense.
This question is very opinion-based (“good community support” is not an objective criterion, and “excellent support” is inviting debate). But it is definitely not off-topic.
Let me stress ...
answered Feb 4 '14 at 21:32
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
4,8081 gold badge21 silver badges54 bronze badges
18
The problem with this type of question is commensurate on the number of possible differences. If program 1 is only marginally different than program 2, then the question isn't by definition too broad. If one could spend all day enumerating the differences between the two, then you do venture into the 'too broad' territory quickly when it comes to our format.
...
18
No to websites; Yes to webapps.
I think the main difference between websites and software is their purpose.
Websites are about content. You read / write / look at or listen to content. Hopefully, the site has features that allow that.
Software is functional. You interact with it and want content to change through your interaction.
While some websites ...
17
Successfully executing this site's vision will be a matter of raising the bar of quality on this site for both questions and answers. By that I mean, the quality of answers that will be acceptable on this site, in order for it to graduate from beta, will have to exceed the typical level of quality that we have come to expect on other sites.
Posts like this ...
17
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 for Super User for end-user software and for Stack Overflow for programming questions.
It may happen, sometimes, that the asker already has the software that ...
answered Jun 8 '14 at 0:18
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
4,8081 gold badge21 silver badges54 bronze badges
16
Yes. The fact that some software may be intended to work around a limitation in some other software is irrelevant.
Most “cracker” software have legitimate uses. Technical limitations in software are often more restrictive than the corresponding license, and even limitations in licenses may not be valid in all jurisdictions. In any case it is not up to us to ...
answered Mar 5 '14 at 12:51
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
4,8081 gold badge21 silver badges54 bronze badges
15
Most of this answer is inline with my thoughts on the subject. Ruling something like "being related to video games" as off-topic on a large scale seems to be looking in the wrong direction. Games are basically a kind of software and much like the line between genres in games has gotten fuzzy over the years, so too has what is and is not a game. There's a lot ...
15
If Software Recommendations SE is able to put together a great method of entertaining certain types of quality recommendation questions, it's entirely conceivable that other sites might pick up on the success and begin relaxing rules pertaining to these types of questions. I discussed this a bit at the end of the introductory guidelines that Gilles cites.
...
15
We need to clearly draw a line between
Which (company|provider|X) offers hosting for Z?
which (as everybody here already correctly stated, so I skip the reasoning) should be 100% off topic here, and
Application to (self-)host Z
which clearly is asking for software. To give a clearer example of the second, consider this user-case:
In our company, we deal ...
14
No.
If you have a question about a particular library (or lack of a library to try but you know one must exist) then you're in-scope. Recommend what language I should use to build this project is just way too broad, and firmly out of the scope that we can deal with here.
14
I think we should discern between two things.
Some questions formulated this way, such as Wiki software being used by Gnome, or Which tool does Canonical use to build Ubuntu releases, in fact may be asking for "a tool to set up a wiki similar to Gnome wiki" or "a tool to build Ubuntu-based distributions". These seem on-topic to me, although badly formulated....
13
I see the issue two-fold. First, I totally agree simple link-dropping isn't the way it should go. And yes, as allquixotic put it: ideally it should be backed by personal experience. So far, nobody will argue I guess.
But as with other SE sites, I think we are after collecting knowledge here. So if I've just heard of a good piece of software matching a ...
12
Even if you reverse the question a bit (let's say he had a modem, and wanted to get it working):
What driver will support the FooModem 2014 on Ubuntu X.Y.Z?
That's .. technically a software question, but it's about getting hardware to work. I think that's out of the scope of the site. It's not a bad question, but we have three other sites where that ...
12
Maybe.
Web apps are on topic. What this means is that if you are looking for a solution to a particular task, you can ask about web apps as a solution.
Here's the dilemma. Web apps inherently include hosting data as part of the app. If they didn't, there would be no point to using a web app.
So whether or not a particular question is on topic or not ...
11
By and large, this site is built around the concept that people are looking for software with a practical purpose in mind. Quoting the ground rules established before the site was launched:
It's important to keep your questions as narrowly-scoped and specific as possible, because this is what's going to steer the types of answers that you receive.
Explain ...
answered Feb 5 '14 at 1:07
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
4,8081 gold badge21 silver badges54 bronze badges
11
After seeing this trial question: no.
The principle of this site is to have recommendation questions. There are two important parts to a recommendation: a user story (what task you want to accomplish), and a requirement list (what needs to be there, what should preferably be there).
X vs Y leads to answers that each tack on their user story (if they're ...
answered Feb 8 '14 at 0:12
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
4,8081 gold badge21 silver badges54 bronze badges
11
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’s fine (and encouraged!) to list specific software that you’ve found and wonder if and how it matches your requirements, and if it’s a recommended solution for ...
11
In my opinion, it makes sense that cloud-based software (SaaS) recommendations be on-topic on this Stack Exchange website.
11
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, web/file hosting or whatever) should be considered off-topic.
For the distinction of what makes a web-app (and thus an on-topic question), see Gilles' answer ...
10
Generally spoken, asking for hardware recommendations are not a good topic for our site, for multiple reasons:
Not only do the answers get obsolete quickly, but even the questions will certainly. Specifications in that sector change too fast to keep up with. Questions should be clearly focused and tell your needs. Think about your needs a year ago when it ...
10
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 the other SE sites.)
If you have a question about (the usage of, a problem with, …) specific libraries and "software tools commonly used by programmers", ...
10
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", rather then stuff that you consume, "content".
Tutorials etc. are content, not software. That makes them off-topic here. Maybe one (you?) could create an own ...
10
I don't see why Wordpress plugins should be an exception here. For reference:
Would plugin recommendations about Minecraft be on topic? → OK
How should we treat questions about plugins and such “software-parts”? → OK
Are questions about browser plugins acceptable? → OK
Cetero censeo: OK – or in other words: Such requests are fully acceptable, as long as ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
