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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Site scope - draft proposal

Parent

Site scope - draft proposal [duplicate]

+8
−4

Closed as duplicate by Lundin‭ on Oct 20, 2020 at 10:46

This question has been addressed elsewhere. See: Community feedback: What type of questions can I ask here?

This question was closed; new answers can no longer be added. Users with the reopen privilege may vote to reopen this question if it has been improved or closed incorrectly.

EDIT: This discussion thread is mostly obsolete now that a new draft has been posted on the site. Please take further discussion & proposals to this meta post instead: Community feedback: What type of questions can I ask here?.


So it would seem that the scope of this site is yet to be defined. It is for now an "everything programming" site. I hope we can narrow it down a lot further. Here is a draft, open for discussion:

On-topic

  • Specific programming problems, where the poster includes their own attempts to solve or debug the problem.
  • Software design, architecture and modelling.
  • Code reviews where the complete code is posted and the poster is asking for a review.
  • Use of software tools used for programming or software engineering.
  • Database management and administration, including the use of tools and languages used for such.
  • Web design, including the use of tools and languages used for such.
  • Software life cycle management, including build configurations, version control, documentation, release, deployment.

Off-topic

  • Code writing requests, where the poster only presents a problem with no attempts to solve it themselves. These are considered rude and may lead to user suspensions.
  • Debug requests with insufficient code posted to answer the question.
  • Embedded systems programming, including: microcontroller programming, hardware description languages, RTOS questions, PLC programming. Please ask these questions at https://electrical.codidact.com/ instead.
  • The use of computers or software for other purposes than software engineering.
  • System/network/server administration.
  • Recommendation questions about which tools, libraries or technologies to use or where to find them.
  • Questions with artificial requirements that have no practical use, including code obfuscation and code golf.
  • Project management questions not specific to software engineering.
  • Career/study advice and workplace issues.
  • Legal or licensing advice.

Please regard the above post as community wiki and feel free to edit it when there is community consensus in the form of highly up-voted answers to this post.

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General comments (11 comments)
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+2
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Recommendation questions about which tools, libraries or technologies to use or where to find them.

I don't support this being on the off-topic list.

(I found my way here from the comments on this question. I think it's a fine question, both before and after the recent edits. It is clearly addressed to a set of people I would expect to belong to a software development community, and if I had relevant information, I would have been happy to answer it here in either form. I think in general we on Codidact can be more accepting of exploratory questions like this which aren't expected to have a single universally accepted answer, relative to the status quo on SO where the goal is to chase that green check.)

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General comments (5 comments)
General comments
Lundin‭ wrote over 3 years ago

Well, if it is off-topic then we have to define what's off-topic or not. "Where do I buy..." ought to be off-topic, or "Where to download...", or "Where to find documentation..." I think those are the main reasons for the corresponding rule on SO. "Which is best, x or y, given specification..." is probably fine.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 3 years ago

My intent with the question was to describe what I want and ask how to get it. I assumed there might be some tool that does that, but I tried to be specific enough that it would work. I agree that a question like "what source-control system should I use?" with no specific requirements wouldn't fit.

r~~‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago

@Lundin Couldn't we instead say that anything a reasonably proficient internet user could be expected to find quickly with a web search is off-topic/a bad question? I think that covers what I find to be annoying about those sorts of questions. I can imagine (not particularly likely, but still) questions of the form ‘where to download...’ etc. which are worthy of being asked, perhaps if the topic is sufficiently old or obscure, or if there are some other extenuating circumstances.

Alexei‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago

@r~~ I think "Recommendation questions about which tools, libraries or technologies to use or where to find them." refers more to questions like "what tool to edit some video?" rather than questions about tools directly involved in software development (documenting the DDL changes belongs to software development).

r~~‭ wrote over 3 years ago

@Alexei I am also fine with that interpretation, although if the intent is just to ban questions about tools uninvolved in software development, maybe that's already covered by ‘The use of computers or software for other purposes than software engineering’.