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This concise summary serves, under the form of a step-by-step guide, as a technical reference to current moderators (not only the diamonds, but also those who are voluntarily taking part of ensuring high quality among Super User), as well as people flagging and editing (even suggesting edits).
When is a question acceptable on our community?
While closing ...
13
Yes, these should be closed as primarily opinion based, because they're subjective and there's no real problem to be solved.
A couple of reasons:
It's easy enough to take a look at what both tools offer online and compare them yourself, with regards to whatever criteria may be more important to you (which could be anything). Answers would simply be a list ...
11
"Throwing around ideas" is usually subjective, and usually not a question anyway.
11
Thanks for pointing out the other questions. They've been closed accordingly.
If you look at the other examples you linked to, you'll find that the most answers just consist of links to resources. This is a problem. We don't want to build up a list of links. We want actual answers here. But those link-only answers are of course just the symptom of the ...
11
I would support this but we need to be somewhat clear about why and when we want to push people to those sites. I actually prefer this to adding those sites to our list of migration targets because we can tell them very explicitly how they can fix their question here (pointing at our site) as well as what is expected over there (hand wave), instead of just ...
10
General outline / category list of things we could / should have:
Shopping questions
Localized troubleshooting questions (by contrast, canonical troubleshooting questions should not be closed)
Questions about imminent future/speculative product releases that are not yet officially released (this does not include official public releases of beta or release ...
10
Most questions that ask "why" a manufacturer did or did not do something are unlikely to be answered with a clear, definitive questions and foster discussions. The answer with +14 votes was exemplary, but I assume that the closing of the question was on principle. (Good question too!)
10
I'll post an answer because there is too much to cover in comments.
Interpersonal
Let me start with the interpersonal issues, since the bulk of the questions were authored by Evan Carroll and there is an appearance, especially to him, that personal animosity was behind this action.
This was not personal, and I don't dislike Evan, as he suggested in his ...
9
I'm not sure we should be closing these questions outright, much less have a specific close reason for them.
At the end of the day, people are unhappy about how they are phrased. These questions can be trivially rewritten from "Give me a script to X" to "How can I do (automate) X", and answers can choose to write scripts if they wish to do so, or provide ...
9
As comments have noted, the criteria I would use when judging which of two otherwise duplicate questions to be marked duplicate is based on quality, not time.
If one of the questions is very recent and hasn't garnered any attention yet, AND the older question it is being marked duplicate of is low quality to the point where its answers are not correct, then ...
8
I like this, as I do feel the current single reason covers too many different cases.
That being said, I think it might be worth grouping software and hardware together, as those are the two things I think of as "concrete" products. Furthermore, it's usually pretty easy to tell from the question which one we're dealing with (and thus, why the question was ...
8
Such a site will never fit within the scope of Stack Exchange's style and mission. Shopping questions just don't fit well into the Q&A model, but they can fit in if they can be reworded into a question. Most of the proposed questions on that site would be fine on Super User if rephrased in the form of a problem/solution, e.g. "how do I do _________" ...
8
Generally, if your question attracts a lot of answers that are merely statements of opinions, then it might be the fault of the question, but it doesn't have to be. In the former case, the question should be closed, in the latter, the answers should be downvoted and/or deleted.
In my opinion, both "Is FTP safe?" is very opinion-based.
If FTP is safe can ...
8
It doesn't seem to be on topic
The question exists on SO, a site we have very little content overlap with. While you acknowledge its existence on SO, you don't explain why you're asking on SU. Which leads to…
It is unclear what you want
The SO question is from the POV of the web site owner. Yours doesn't seem to be, but you're still calling it "cross-post",...
8
Basically the community consensus is that software recommendation questions are off topic for superuser. You can ask them on Software recommendations, as long as you meet the quality criteria.
There's another issue here - SE as a whole isn't really a replacement for good research - While you have a clearly articulated idea of what you think you need - the ...
7
I like everything but the phrase 'too localized'. First, it's incorrect - 'too localized' doesn't mean what we thought it did, localization refers to adaptation for a specific locale.
Second, there's a lot of ambiguity around the term. Flat out saying "Relevant only to the question author, at the time that they asked" is a much better way of putting it.
...
7
In general, question regarding software recommendation are very often considered off-topic.
If you want to know more about this ongoing issue, I would advise you to look into the numerous questions we already have discussing that topic. Such as:
Why was my software-rec question closed?
How literally does SU take "not about a shopping or buying ...
7
What does "mobilize" even mean? It is unclear what you're trying to achieve.
Why post another question on Super User if the same thing was asked on Stack Overflow already?
Your question shows no research effort.
7
Public beta's too early for migration anyway, and considering the two recommendations sites are unique in their scope and previous experience as a moderator on software recommendations I'm not sure this is the greatest idea.
If someone asks a question that's clearly and explicitly off topic, its probably a clear sign that the question needs some adult ...
7
Does Super User have something similar to "could not reproduced"?
Super User does not have that specific close reason as you have noticed.
If you have 3000+ rep
You can Vote to Close then do the following:
Close > Off-topic because > Other > Comment: "I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because the problem is no longer reproducible and the ...
7
Well, ReactOS is perpetually in alpha and has been as long as I can remember it.
Darned thing is brokenish, and a good many of these are bugs that should be reported to ReactOS developers rather than asked here. While I did argue against it, there is no roadmap for when ReactOS would be in a usable state unlike Windows 8.1.
I'd say that the logic is still ...
6
Ironic that this post which is about inappropriately migrating questions from SO to SU, and was originally posted on meta-SO (and in my opinion belongs there), was itself inappropriately migrated from MSO to MSU.
After all, it is obvious that the purpose of the post was to inform SO users of the policy on SU relating to off-topic questions. Migrating this ...
6
I'm not certain why it was closed - my best guess would be that close voters considered IRC to be a web service.. anyway I've reopened it - since it's something that's done from client side
6
If the community sees fit to do so, we can create a custom close reason for questions about bugs for pre-release software.
I don't personally think it makes sense to close all questions that are at all related to pre-release software, but I do think that questions specifically about bugs/errors/hardware incompatibilities with pre-release software don't do ...
6
Who defined what is "most common"? For that you'd have to run surveys with a representative sample of people in a representative sample of countries and then ask them how they would pronounce the four-letter word "UEFI". Anything else would be speculation, or personal taste, but in any case there does not appear to be any ground truth here.
There's a ...
6
I know what you're referring to, but the questions you chose aren't the best examples. These had other issues. However, I've run into questions like you describe; what look like perfectly good Excel questions voted to close as off-topic for no obvious reason. For example: import-text-file-into-excel. And I believe this one was also voted to be closed as ...
6
Your flag was correct.
However...
The only part of the question that makes it off-topic is the sentence:
Is there any software that can make it work?
You can (and should) flag questions that are off-topic, but an even better option is fixing the post. In this case as @DavidPostill's edit demonstrates, that sentence wasn't even necessary and simply ...
6
It is not something that you, as a user, can do anything about, nor should you need to care. There are too many window frameworks with too many styles that all can look very different or very similar depending on the developer who wrote the program. You cannot just edit the program to change the behaviour of one window from a user perspective.
As such you ...
5
Note: as of today (June 25th), the new close reasons are live. Moderators can edit the close reasons, although we will only do so with community input*.
The current custom off-topic reasons are:
Questions seeking product, service, or learning material recommendations are off-topic because they tend to become obsolete
quickly.
Instead, describe ...
5
From some of the examples linked to in the original post, and with some ideas from the Help Center article on on-topic questions, I tried to cover all the bullet points that Super User is not about. Note that some of the following reasons might overlap with migrating some questions, but my train of thought is that these reasons can be used for questions ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
