Five years ago, the issue was raised as to whether questions related to problems with beta software are on-topic. The gist of the logic for why they are not is in suggested wording for a custom close reason:
Questions about bugs in pre-release/beta software or prototype hardware are off-topic. Bugs in pre-release products are common and even expected, and are often fixed before the final version is released — at which point the question becomes obsolete. Consider reporting these types of problems directly to the product manufacturer.
The same logic applies to capabilities that haven't been implemented yet, finding needed drivers or libraries, and similar questions.
We recently had a number of questions posted about ReactOS, which the developers identify as being at the alpha stage. The questions were about certain applications not yet being supported, and various error messages encountered when trying to run certain applications.
Before I vote to close a large number of questions from a single user, I wanted to get community input, especially since the closure reason isn't an official one. I don't want this to appear to be a vendetta.
The questions are:
- ReactOS: WOW16 applications are not supported internally by NTVDM at the moment
- ReactOS: ERROR_BAD_EXE_FORMAT - \VBOXSVR\… is not a valid Win32 application
- ipconfig: ERROR_PROC_NOT_FOUND - The specified procedure could not be found
- What provides VCRUNTIME140.dll? (about where to find a dll; these often get closed as off-topic, anyway, but I'm not sure about this one).
- There is also an old question: Get The VMware Tools SVGA Driver On ReactOS?. That is more of a VMWare configuration question, but it stems from the current state of ReactOS. So it falls in the same class of questions, but I'm not sure whether it would be considered off-topic.
The first three seem clearly off-topic. The last two, seem to be in a grey area. Any input on how the community views these?