Should software recommendations be closed or moved?

Question

I noticed that the community (sometimes) get software recommendation questions. These questions seem to be often closed. However, there is also now a Software Recommendations Stack Exchange (no longer a beta) that allows such questions.

The site's acceptable guidelines say they accept questions with:

• A purpose — a task to accomplish, a user story
• Some objective requirements — a minimum set of features

Most off-topic questions that are looking for software recommendations fit these requirements.

Should the questions asking for software recommendations, and fit those guidelines, be moved there? Or continue to be closed?

Answer 1

Where the questions meet the rather high quality guidelines of Software Recommendations I would suggest flagging for moderator attention and asking for it to moved.

The problem is that many of the questions we get are vague, and not particularly descriptive nor objective.

These questions should be closed, and potentially the user told the correct site and shown their expected guidelines.

The trouble is that many users just want us to give them some piece of software and oh god how difficult can it be why do I have to put is so much effort just for one of you nerds to give me a single name.

Finding someone willing to put in the minimum effort to ask what is a clear and objectively good question is actually rather difficult. Most times you point people at Software Recommendations they simply repost the same borderline question there without a single thought. We still try though, and in the case of "good" questions I would migrate them straight away.

We've discussed adding Software Recommendations to the list of migration targets in the past, but we only have 4 targets we can assign, and currently the others see enough use that we cannot really justify swapping them still.