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Site scope - draft proposal [duplicate]
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.
Is a question about importing data into Excel on topic (as seen here)? This seems like it would fall under "questions ab …
4y ago
I propose removing this from the off topic list > System/network/server administration. I am not an expert, but I …
4y ago
I don't really see the point of listing specific things as "on topic." Any such list is bound to either be incomplete or …
4y ago
> Recommendation questions about which tools, libraries or technologies to use or where to find them. I don't support …
4y ago
> Questions with artificial requirements that have no practical use, including code obfuscation and code golf Questi …
4y ago
Based on this proposal, I have created a designated section within the Help section: What type of questions can I ask …
4y ago
6 answers
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I don't really see the point of listing specific things as "on topic." Any such list is bound to either be incomplete or have a grey area overlap with things off-topic.
I also disagree with some of the things you list as off topic, specifically
System/network/server administration.
I also think that this shouldn't be off topic, for the same reasons mentioned in James's response. While I am not familiar with it, I don't see why it wouldn't be on topic; configuring a server backend for a project seems like software development to me.
Questions with artificial requirements that have no practical use, including code obfuscation and code golf.
Over on Writing, we have a category for Challenges. I don't see why we can't have a similar Code Golf/Programming Challenges category here as well. (UPDATE: I suggested it here)
Finally, I want to address what you mentioned at the beginning
It is for now an "everything programming" site. I hope we can narrow it down a lot further.
This is an "everything programming" site because that is what it was founded as. Eventually, there will be more specific sites and we might start asking people to post those questions elsewhere, but until then, this will continue to be an umbrella site for any type of programming.
Is a question about importing data into Excel on topic (as seen here)? This seems like it would fall under "questions about computers or software that are not connected to software development/engineering" as Excel is a general purpose spreadsheet software, and the question does not address formulas or VBA.
I propose removing this from the off topic list
System/network/server administration.
I am not an expert, but I believe a lot of this has software implications.
For example, a SQL AlwaysOn cluster, is going to dependent on several areas of the points of all 3 of these items. For the person who will have questions about AlwaysOn, many of the things about System/network/server administration are under their direct control, or they are responsible for requesting change to.
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.)
Based on this proposal, I have created a designated section within the Help section:
What type of questions can I ask here?
This can evolve over time based on feedback provided by the community.
Questions with artificial requirements that have no practical use, including code obfuscation and code golf
Questions with no practical use can and have always existed in some way. I could be programming anything as a hobby, and I could simply get rejected because my question "does not have a practical use" and has "artificial requirements".
I do agree that gamified questions shouldn't be allowed(coding challenges and the like), but if a person is asking for help with obfuscating code or doing something absolutely useless, it should still be fine as a general question, since it is about coding, after all.
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