Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Meta

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.

Post History

50%
+1 −1
Meta Are reference requests welcome here?

If we ignore the part of recommendation questions leading to opinion-based answers, the main concern against these kind of questions is that they don't add anything of value to this site. But also ...

posted 3y ago by Lundin‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Lundin‭ · 2020-10-26T07:20:55Z (over 3 years ago)
If we ignore the part of recommendation questions leading to opinion-based answers, the main concern against these kind of questions is that they don't add anything of value to _this_ site.

But also one of the main design concerns of SO: they didn't want to end up as yet another low quality programming site with broken links all over the place. That's why they always had a policy against "link-only answers". In addition, link-only answers open up for spam.

10 years of SO experience has shown that almost every single question asking for off-site resources or recommendations is also low quality in itself. The rules against off-site recommendations and link-only answers served that site very well.

I see no reason why we should have a different policy, it will only lower the quality of the content. We _must_ have some sort of quality of content concern on this site, or it will end up as yet another trashy programmer forum like so many others out there.

If needed, we can always put together a maintained list of external resources, book recommendations etc inside the specific tag wiki.