It's quite clear to me the reason for establishing rules on any Stack Exchange site. Yesterday, I found this question, which I answered, and once sent, I read JakeGould's comment and realized that indeed, it was an off-topic question, as it's asking for a software recommendation (mostly).
My question is: Should I remove my answer so I stop promoting questions that are against the Super User policy? Or are these policies concerning only questions and not answers?
My edits as well as comment on that question was my assumption of good faith on the part of a new contributor to the site. Since the password protection part of the question was valid, my comment was—and is—meant to encourage the contributor to perhaps self-edit their question to make it more appropriate for the site. And at worst, it serves as an explanation as to why the question might be closed or receive no attention.
If after a day or so, the original poster doesn’t act or even acknowledge the issues, then I consider the question useless at best and a nuisance at worst with bad answers piling on top of bad answers and a door open for SPAM posts. Low quality posts attract low quality content. Comments like what I posted are made to encourage users to understand these sites are not some random message board. This site is a resource that is useful if you understand how to use it.
You are asking this:
It's quite clear to me the reason for establishing rules on any StackExchange site. Yesterday, I found this question, which I answered, and once sent, I read JakeGould's comment and realized that indeed, it was an offtopic question, as it's asking for a software recommendation (mostly).
Now, let’s read the comment I left on that question here:
A few issues with this question. First the password protection question is valid and I believe would work here on it’s own or perhaps on the Web Applications Stack Exchange site. But past that the rest of the question regarding an alternative piece of software is really not appropriate for this site. It’s too broad and opinion based.
My comment is two parts as the original poster’s question is two parts. I believe the password protection aspect that kicks off the question is perfectly valid with the only very slight caveat that being that the Web Applications Stack Exchange site might be a better fit.
The rest of the question is definitely just asking for software recommendations. And heck, the title of the question itself is off-topic if not unclear: “Dropbox or similar program”
The problem is this kind of question ends up being a mess of opinions, recommendations and delusions. No disrespect to your answer nKn, but to me it takes all of 5 seconds of reading a question like that to make a strong assumption that the original poster needs an “off the shelf” and “ready to roll” package and cannot even begin to understand what needs to be done to implement a tool like ownCloud. Simply downloading ownCloud, installing it and running it is only the tip of the iceberg in setting up a package like that. And it also sounds like the user is in a very small office without I.T. staff so Dropbox makes sense.
Past any of that, while the question was close as I literally have been typing this answer, another new contributor commented that this question is a duplicate of this other question. In the assumption of good faith towards new contributors, I now think the question should just have been closed as a duplicate—and not as off topic—simply with comments standing explaining the disparity in the question’s content.
From: Should I answer off-topic questions?
Accepted Answer: "Generally speaking, answering questions that should get closed encourages bad behavior."
From: Is it bad to answer off-topic questions, knowing they are off-topic?
Accepted Answer: "Yes, it is bad to answer off-topic questions. What on earth is the point of defining them as off-topic if you're going to answer them anyway?"
No it's not; SE is for helping people, which you did.
Migrate the QA to https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ if that's a better location.
