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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

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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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1 comment thread

General comments (11 comments)
General comments
Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I would personally like if we could keep this site (or another in the network) tolerant to subjective but on-topic questions about things like program design, coding style and best practices. These are things that every programmer face, so there should be a place to ask for advice about them, instead of having them closed as "opinion-based".

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I'd like to see testing here, too -- unit, regression, integration, etc, and frameworks for doing them.

James Jenkins‭ wrote over 4 years ago

Can you clarify "The use of computers or software for other purposes than software engineering."? Is this like hardware questions?

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@James Yes, mainly all PC helpdesk kind of questions.

James Jenkins‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@lundin, so things that would be in scope at https://superuser.com/ ?

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@James Yes indeed.

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@Monica Please propose that in an answer so that the community can vote for/against. I'll edit the question when there seems to be a community consensus for/against something. Though I have no idea how many active users there are and how many votes that should be regarded as "consensus".

msh210‭ wrote over 4 years ago

–1. This proposal conflates scope (what subjects are included) with question quality. For example "where the poster only presents a problem with no attempts to solve it themselves" if they'd be fine if they showed research done are not out of scope; likewise "Debug requests with insufficient code posted to answer the question".

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@msh210 Not at all. For example for a Code Golf site, it would make perfect sense for the question not to make any attempt to solve it. It is open for discussion whether Code Golf is on topic or not, separate discussion here: https://software.codidact.com/questions/277263

Lundin‭ wrote about 4 years ago

One month later and there's neither a clear consensus nor any constructive discussion. I'm guessing we'll have to stick to a "random programming stuff" site for now. Which is very unappealing to domain experts and power users. Is the aim here to build a much worse and shallow version of SO or something better and different?

Alexei‭ wrote about 4 years ago

@Lundin Indeed it took quite much to have an official on-topic (and off-topic) section. Based on your input, now we have it here.