I am somewhat new to Stack Exchange, but one thing I have noticed is that the policy of not allowing discussion type questions is a very good idea. It helps keep Stack Exchange sites focused and to the point.  At the same time however, many times I have questions come up that require discussion. Something like "Which programming language should I learn first" is not appropriate for Stack Overflow, but could get a reasonably helpful answer on other forums like DreamInCode.net, Programming Forums, or maybe even Reddit. It seems like it would be more efficient to create a list of forums that we can redirect users with these sorts of questions to.   For example, instead of simply closing the example question above about a first programming language, could it be closed with something like "Stack Overflow is not a site for discussion based questions, but you can try asking about it on &lt;'better-alternative-website'>"?  As far as the idea suggested in , the idea would be similar, but instead of creating an alternative on Stack Exchange itself, questions closed as not constructive could include a "suggested place to ask" link, which would be specific to each Stack Exchange site (Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange redirects to the Raspberry Pi forums, Arduino to Arduino forums, etc.)
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Stuff like polls, recommendations based on subjective constraints, puzzles, webcomics etc. do not belong on the serious main SE sites, where professionals should be considered at work and having just a few spare minutes ("code's compiling") to answer questions, so they should not be distracted by such things. However, I'd also like to have a home for these things still using the SE engine. For the reason I mentioned before, this needs to be a separate place though. Let's call it four.[sitename-here].com.
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There is . Is the site appropriate for stuff related to requesting frameworks and libraries? Or should we have another site for that (e.g. name it Frameworks Recommendations or stuff alike)?  I can ask stuff there like: I need a software satisfying W, X, Y, and Z, but I'd like -some day- ask like: I need a Python library satisfying W, X, Y, and Z. The audience may be (and perhaps will be) different.    Is that website on-topic for stuff like that? Or should we open another proposal for that?  No: It's not about asking for a giga-dump for subjectivish questions. The linked-to-dupe question was written and answered with an old mindset and without Software Recommendations in mind. Also it does not consider this specific kind of questions but all the crap in one place. So, no,  is not an appropriate dupe mark for this question.
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There are many general resource questions that ask questions such as "what is the best programming language?" or "How do I implement this commonly-confusing thing?", which get closed for being subjective or generalized.  While these are currently outside the scope of SE, many have generated .  Therefore, I suggest that instead of closing these questions, the best ones should be relocated to a new sister site like this:     assorted.stackoverflow.com (or any other prefix)   I've looked around and seen something like this suggested before, but what I found suggested things such as a compiled FAQ or separate site (which is similar, but then would be hard to search since all site questions would be merged into one long list).  Of course, I understand the implications of such a heady statement, and the effort that would be required to accomplish this must be immense.  However there are good reasons for this change:     This would provide a place to ask subjective questions, which means instead of closing questions against the community's will, misplaced questions can be migrated. This can discourage repetitious questions that continuously ask the same popular questions.  It certainly wouldn't get all of the duplicates, but it might help. This would encourage users to write new, useful questions that are inherently subjective,  but are still very helpful.   A number of technologies could accompany this that could make integration simpler:   Each site has the sub-site in the main toolbar listed between "chat" and "main/meta".  This allows for quick navigation between the sub-sites. The new sub-site could have its search results automatically included in the "main" portion of the site so that it can be seen by people posting their questions on the main page (to help avoid duplicates). Either a new rating system could be imposed which does not affect the user's rep (i.e. is local to the question only) so that the questions can be ordered by rating, or rating can be taken out altogether.  I don't recommend tying in the rating with the parent site because the sites may become indistinguishable. Allow for migration to the new sub-site.  Perhaps require less migration votes to move to this particular sub-site because A) it still pertains to the actual subject matter, and B) Migration would be more frequent to this sub-site.   Finally, if this would become a reality, Stack Exchange would likely require a change to their mission statement to include that there is a small subsection devoted to the most highly-valued subjective questions, or something along those lines.  Now, nothing ever gets done without first being discussed, so how does everybody feel about all of this?  NOTE TO DOWNVOTERS Thank you for your interest.  Downvoting does not mean that you dislike my post.  Do not downvote because the question happens to be a duplicate of a question that by all means, I would never have found without stumbling across it myself (yes, I took a good hard look before I asked this one).  Remember that downvoting is only meant to indicate a bad question or for feature requests, a poorly thought-out request.  I took a lot of time writing this request; because you do not agree with it is no cause for the (to quote another user) "Haterade".
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If I have a specific question I want to ask about, but I don't know which Stack Exchange site would be on topic for asking that question, where can I ask where to ask that question?  Is there any generic place where we can ask for advice? Is it here?  This is not about a specific question but in general.  For example: "Where should I ask for advice about fishing?", or if I need to know where I should ask "What would be the best fishing rod to fish for salmon?" (regardless of how good/bad these examples are)
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Guys, I just wonder if people are allowed to have civilized discussion (on any IT topic) on this forum without actually being accused of starting a row. I'm asking this question for a reason that few days I've asked few questions referring to VM, JIT etc. and compared them to C++ way and despite the fact that I've explained myself that I'm not starting any agro with anyone, that I'm really just genuinely curious, my post was first closed and then removed. I'm asking: What's wrong with asking nonstandard questions which sometimes my be quite difficult to answer? Thanks
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I understand and agree that opinion based questions are a bad thing on Stack Overflow, but shouldn't we have a place to ask this kind of question? There are so many times where I look at different frameworks and have to make decisions that will affect the next 3 years of my life without actually having all the pros and cons of both sides.  So my question is: Is there a place to ask these questions?  And if the answer is no, could that be a new Stack Exchange sub-website?
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SO has long had a policy of closing questions asking for recommendations as "off topic", with the following kind of closure annotation:     Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.   Since we now have , could this response be changed to something more along the lines of:     Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow.  Consider submitting this to Software Recommendations.     An alternative is to have the question simply migrated to Software Recommendations.  This might not produce high-quality questions because there's no a priori reason to believe the question has been posed well, but SR can probably handle those cases.  See also .  A suggestion that a link to the SR rules be included, to ensure the poster understands the not-implied threat of secondary closure, is an excellent one.  Maybe something like this?     Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow.  Consider submitting this to Software Recommendations. Be sure to follow their  to avoid closure there.
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I have a coding question with two compilable options. I want to ask which is better and why. Code review, programmers, stack exchange...im not really sure? Where is this question appropriate.   It may be an opinion based question and it may not. I don't really know until I know the answer. Like I said, both ways produce the same results, but I don't know which is the better practice.   What site does this belong on?
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There are a quite a few language learning related sites on the Stack Exchange network. I may have missed a few, but here they are:                      It would be nice to have a single language related site and use tags when asking questions about a specific language. Stack Overflow already does something similar for programming languages.  Benefits   Automatic support for minority or endangered languages. There are thousands of languages that will never have enough support to create their own SE site. Yet many have a core group of learners and researchers that would benefit from being able to ask and answer questions just by adding a new tag.  Cross-language questions. Many languages are related to each other. A common site would make it easy to ask a question about something that covers two languages. Just add both language tags. Cut down on the proliferation of new SE sites. I don't know that having lots of sites is necessarily bad, but sometimes less is more. Better search engine results. I can't guarantee this one, but it seems likely. Stack Overflow is always near the top for programming language questions, but I rarely find SE language sites when I search for English or Chinese related questions.   I suppose that everyone is too entrenched in their own communities now to change, but I thought I would suggest it anyway.
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Where should I post question like:     Where can I find books on [some programing subject]?   or      Online sources for learning  [some programing technique]?   ? ? Should it be community wiki? or is it a taboo in the ?
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I am new to Stack Exchange. I know there is a lot of discussion sites for Stack Exchange. I would like to know about there were any Stack Exchange site available for discussing and solving personal psychological problems.
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There are times when I'd like to communicate something to the Stack Overflow community but it doesn't fit a question.  Right now, I have the product of many answers (a bunch of code) I'd like to share back but can't.  If each user had a blog or wiki (or something) they could create articles / blogs on and then link the related SO questions to it. You could then add an icon to those questions to show there is also more expansive information available.  By linking to the questions, this means anyone could author articles addressing a question outside of the scope of the more simple Q/A scenario.  Of course, many people have blogs but they must link that in a not so immersive fashion and not everyone has a blog (and also many blogs are inadequate in displaying text from a coding viewpoint (e.g. formatting code). Folding such a mechanism into SO would open up all sorts of creative opportunities and make the site even more sticky for users.  I think it's a winner and I'd use it for sure.
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There is so much great information on Stack Exchange. A lot of it one discovers only on a need to know basis when running into a similar situation. I was thinking about a new feature to leverage this.  I think that Stack Exchange holds great value in turning its old questions (which already have answers) into a more direct learning experience. Let us say I'm a user that wants to learn more about a specific topic. SE has some knowledge of my skill level on that topic. If not it can try to estimate it by presenting me with questions which already have answers. If I feel comfortable with answering the questions I receive, and the answers are familiar terrain, I can give feedback on how confident I am in resolving the question and also how entertaining the question is as a learning experience. This way SE can update my skill level and update the difficulty and meta information of the question. With this closed feedback loop it can then continue providing me with questions which are relevant to my skill level. Once I'm at a high skill level it could then occasionally present me with questions which don't have an answer as well.  Do you think this makes sense? Would you use it or do you think it would help attract new users to the site and teach them how to write higher quality answers?
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Instead of asking a question I would love to share the one or other code snippet I have created that is too small to make a full article on e.g. CodeProject.com or CodePlex.com.  Question: Would it be a good idea to post it as a Stack Overflow question? Or are there any other suggestions how to share it?  (Of course I could post it on my own weblog and then twitter about it, but I would love to put it in more of a programming context)
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"What library can I use to do X?" type of questions are not welcome on Stack Overflow, right?  Even if they are not welcome on SO proper, is there any other SE board where I could ask such questions?
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Take , and note the description:     Proposed Q&amp;A site for professional and expert amateur chefs interested in the more subjective aspects of cooking; this would be to Cooking SE as Programmers SE is to Stack Overflow    It seems like  is MASSIVELY popular (has more views per-day than any other proposal by a factor of almost 2). There's also a .  Should we allow this trend to continue, possible resulting in things like a subjective web applications proposal? It seems like almost ANY proposal's users could benefit from having a place to ask subjective questions, seeing how much the subjective programmers proposal took off, how many good questions are asked and closed as subjective, and how many successful blogs and discussion sites there are.  But it seems like having totally different sites for this is wrong, as they would share no more official connection between them than with a gaming and skateboarding proposal. If they could be linked somehow, at the least like Stack&nbsp;Overflow and Server&nbsp;Fault are linked as part of a trilogy, they could both be more prosperous.   Another idea would be having a subjective version of every site (subjective.blah.com, like every site has a meta.blah.com). This would be a great way to link the two, and the separation would still be there as it. Heck we could even do it with the existing trilogy sites, with a 'belongs on subjective' auto-move feature like 'belongs on meta'. It's obvious that people want to ask subjective questions. The issue at hand is how (or if) we choose to enable them to do that with the Stack&nbsp;Exchange model. This is a much more long term issue that will need heavy discussion before any consensus can be reached.  EDIT: I see this question proposed something like this for polls. What I am proposing is a separate dominion for all questions that are valid except for being subjective. Hence every site could have a normal section, a subjective section, and a chat section. This may seem complicated, but IMHO it's a great way to divide up a topic. There would be a place to answer questions, discuss topics, and just talk. As far as I can see this covers every area users would be concerned with, leading to a one-stop site that would provide good organization for all areas of a topic.  Thoughts? (sorry for the big wall of text ;)
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Consider the question   Asymptotic notation questions have been pretty standard for Stack Overflow.  This fairly interesting beginner question is up, but has already accumulated a couple of 'close' votes.  One of them is for 'off topic' but, possibly because I'm a theory guy, it seems very much on topic for programming and related topics.  You could argue for "computer science" potentially, but it would seem this, like questions on, oh, NP-complete problems and such, are things serious professional programmers should know and are interested in.  You could also make a case for mathematics and event the theory stack, although it's probably a little light for theory.  But with all of these separate categories, there seems to me to be a real risk that interesting questions will be modded/closed/moved until the OP loses interest.  Perhaps we've gotten a little too compartmentalized?