Foreword added at +2/-1:

To make this clear: As far as I can tell (and I quote a diamond moderator below), this is already official moderation policy on this site. I just want to have this added explicitly to the FAQ. This is not a discussion about whether that policy actually is reasonable or useful.

If you oppose the stance of not allowing any questions asking for recommendations, having what is already current policy in diamond moderation added to the FAQ could even lead to increased support for you as visibility of this policy increases — users will actually be able to learn about this outside of the Meta archives and comments to users whose topics were closed based on this.

In the end, it's just not useful having the FAQ say something different than what is really being enforced. That's what this topic is about.

Please post your suggestions on what the FAQ should say on this issue. I'm especially looking forward to diamond contributions — it's time this issue is cleared up.

Original post below.

I think we should make it clear, that asking for recommendations of any kind is off-topic.

The current clause, initially introduced through this Meta topic reads:

and it is not about …

• [...]
• a shopping or buying recommendation

But we don't just consider shopping or buying recommendations off topic, but any kind of recommendation. Diago ♦ wrote an answer to my question here:

We've been very clear defining what is and isn't allowed, and any type of recommendation supposed to be off-topic. Hardware one's date quickly, but software one's also have issues with version upgrades, and requirements being specific to a scenario, so do we need one for every type of requirement each individual user has?

^{Emphasis mine}

In a comment, he later wrote:

The key is recommendation, not the shopping part. If your asking to recommend something to perform a task, your stepping on dangerous ground. […] the policy is in place network wide, and I can't see it changing anytime soon.

^{Consider the whole quote emphasized (didn't look good though, so I skipped doing that)}

I'm likely not the only user who missed this fact for a long time.

So let's put that into the FAQ to make it very clear:

and it is not about …

• [...]
• a shopping, buying, or product recommendation

I think we should keep shopping and buying to make it clear that we don't answer questions about what web shop's shipping policies are better.