There are numerous Meta posts on software recommendation answers, and the advice on posting them seems to be universal. How to handle low quality ones that have been posted gets murkier by the day.

• From How to handle low-quality software recommendation answers posted one month ago: Two moderators: "flag for deletion"

• In the question When are software recommendation answers not an answer, posted two weeks ago, I brought up apparently conflicting advice on a flag and raised the issue of solutionless answers. It received no moderator input and no "official" advice on what to do with these answers.

• Per the advice mentioned above, I flagged this link-only software recommendation for deletion today: https://superuser.com/a/737124/364367. The flag was declined with this comment: that's typically the case for software rec questions but nothing actionable by moderators. the post can be easily fixed by any community member.

  This was not a software rec question, but they are off-topic. Does that mean that link-only answers are OK if they are in response to off-topic questions?

  That aside, community members can leave a comment requesting the author to improve the post (if the author is still around). If that doesn't happen, I'm not aware of any mechanism by which <20K rep community members can get a link-only answer into a community review queue or vote to delete it.

So we seem to have come full circle. There used to be a dedicated flag reason for link-only answer (not spam), applicable to any answer, software rec or otherwise. (Edit: This was in the low quality post queue) That disappeared. Forget solutionless software rec answers; even link-only software recommendations are now back in the category of not preferable but acceptable, and it is up to the community to downvote them as the only remedy.

It is difficult for community members to effectively curate the site when the standards are so nebulous and mercurial.