I am planning to make an application to digitize and organize documents that a company, or forum, etc may have.  The first thing that came to my mind was:   How should I look for possible competitors that already have their product on the market?   To see what I am against, so I believe this question would be rather flamed if posted on the SO.  Other things I was thinking of:   Once I know about the other companies doing this same application I am planning, what should I consider before taking the step to do it or look for something else? Is there a public or a good resource where I should look first about the type of application I am planning to create? Would SO be a good place for this sort of questions or where should I go with those question I have?   Just wanted to add here since I stated on the comment answer below, that what concerns me the most is the attitude of the community whenever a post that may not suit it or is subjective or don't suit it at all, people go all out to bang it with negative votes without leaving a comment or giving the moderators a chance to move it, hence why I asked here first.  PS: hope I didn't do anything wrong by posting this here as well. If I'm missing a tag please let me know to added to it, I wasn't sure of what other tags I should use here.
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I came across the following question:    This can be easily flagged for too broad or opinion based, but I wonder on which stack-exchange site can one ask answers for such a question?
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There are many problems with what I perceive to be countless dupes of low quality questions in the [regex] tag. Rather than complaining about it, I've decided to take matters into my own hands. I'm thinking that I should start a series of [regex] articles. I do fear retaliation from the community, accusation of rep-whoring, etc, so I decided that perhaps I should start with more advanced techniques that is rarely (if ever) covered before. If I get good feedback (by votes and comments), then I may eventually start to cover some of the basics, stuff that has already been covered no doubt dozens if not hundreds of times before (at that point it may become somewhat of a rep-whoring, since it's essentially dupes of many dupes, but I hope in putting together well-written articles with generic but carefully-chosen examples, we can link them from the tag info for good learning resources). I'd like feedback from the community before I start to embark on this effort.  Why advanced first? The advanced articles will most probably be original, i.e. not dupes, but at the same time may not be as useful to the general public as the basic articles. The problem with the basic articles, of course, is that they've already been covered at various corners of the [regex] tag, but rarely (as far as I know) in a way that is comprehensive, self-containing, and aimed at being educational (instead of just writing an answer for the sake of getting votes/acceptances). My reasoning for starting with advanced first is, like mentioned, to avoid accusation of rep-whoring. Once I've earned the community's trust, I'd then gradually move on to the basics.  The Go Ahead OK, guys, I've decided to do this. I'm a bit busy right now so I'm not sure when I'll start, but probably within a week or so. Thanks for the feedback.  List of articles I've started it.       This is not part of the articles, but someone asked a very good inquisitive question, and my solution uses nested reference, so it's very much in line with the current series:    I'll appreciate all feedbacks and comments.  Unresolved questions  Should we create a tag for this series and/or others? What should it be? Is it a ?
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I am working on a Web application, and I was looking for a reasonable implementation for one of its backend services. I wanted to ask the community if they have done something similar and if so how does their implementation work?  This is a subjective and possibly open-ended question, hence Stack&nbsp;Overflow is not the right place to ask this question.  Is there a Stack&nbsp;Exchange community in which one can ask suchlike questions?
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Today, I asked my first question on WebApps.SE: . (I'm fairly active on other SE sites.) My question was about a web app that didn't have a tag created for it yet, and since I don't have 300 rep on the site, I wasn't able to create the appropriate tags. Looking over the list of tags already on the site, none of them looked like they would have been appropriate for my question.  What is the right course of action in this situation?
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I'm looking into developing an ordering app for a potential client. The main part that I'm concerned about in this question is the payment mechanism. I would assume that there are already multiple plugins or similar programs out there, but I'm not sure where (or if) I should be asking for recommendations.
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I submitted a  and one reviewer said the material was plagiarized.  I don't mind saying my contributions are minor, etc.  However, this is a particularly nasty form of rejection.  I have written this text from scratch. It is possible that my memory sub-consciously found something I read in the past.  Perhaps this was an incident of clicking on the wrong reason radio button or maybe the intent was references are needed?  I actually search around the web for references, but I didn't find anything.  Wouldn't some additional text showing the source of plagiary be very helpful?    The only source I may have quoted was  were they noted a difference between backtick and $() to allow nesting.  However, I thought the text was significantly different and it originated on stack overflow?         Plagiarism is not a crime per se but in academia and industry it is a serious moral offence, and cases of plagiarism can constitute copyright infringement.    Certainly when ever I am writing a tag wiki I look at all the question tagged on stack overflow.  Is this considered an infringement?  I thought we were sort of a collective and the tag wiki shouldn't have to attribute the question the tag is describing.  Some sort of additional text on what the plagiary was would be most helpful.  Edit: For reference, here is the reject reason list [as of Dec 2013].    The copied content is the first reason in the list; which causes the plagiary reason text.  This is unknown to some lower reputation users of stack overflow.
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(probably soon to be deleted) made me wonder what would be the right way to handle surveys like that:     I'm doing a worker interview for High School and I want to be a computer programmer.      What is your job title?   What is your work history?   ...   What are the duties of a beginner?   Where is work available?     To me it feels like spam but checking the  makes me doubt that it really qualifies. I find it somewhat difficult to state that questions like in above example advertise something:     A post should be marked as spam ONLY when it contains an ...   If there was a link to a survey off-site (like in most similar questions I've seen so far) I would easily flag it as spam. But this one didn't have link, it expected answers right there, on our site, making it hard to say what exactly is advertised. Or it would be correct to say something like asker advertises their survey?  Another option I considered was flagging for moderator attention. But I can't come up with compelling flag message that would justify mod involvement assuming that question can be closed with 3K users votes.  That leaves the only option to handle such questions - vote to close, correct? (At sites where I'm active such questions are blatant off-topic; maybe this is so network wide but I am not sure).
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Saw this in the reopen queue tonight    The question is closed as off-topic/general-computing and the OP apologizes for having to post it here.   Sure enough, that is what the company directs customers to do:  From:       Need some help? Ask a question on Stackoverflow with the tag    nitrousio and our developers (and other developers) will reach out to help you.      newest questions tagged nitrousio - Stack Overflow      ....list....   I guess no one anticipated that not all product support questions will be valid programming questions.  Or maybe it is about turning support into a profit center by attracting other customers.  Not sure that makes sense, though.  I mean, I'd like private support tickets when I contact a service provider.   This has been addressed previously back in 2009 by Jeff Atwood in an answer to   However, there is a newer 2012 duplicate  where the answer is effectively "OK, if..."  I thought I would post this here so the community can chime in on where the limits of this kind of thing should be and enable the proper people to take care of it.
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On which Stack Exchange site can I ask questions like        When will [some new feature] for [some product] be released?   Where can I download an update for [some product]?   I'm getting errors when accessing the customer portal for [some company] – how can I fix this?   Why was I banned for doing [some action] on [some platform]?   Why is [some company] discontinuing [some product]?   Why is [some company] giving away [some product] for free?   What's the price for [some product]?      or any other product support/customer service questions?  It's not a product related to programming (or I've read  on Meta Stack Overflow) so I know Stack Overflow isn't the right place. Which other site in the network will take these kind of questions?
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I'm mostly active on  and we have a separate . Most of my questions on IT Security meta have answers with links here. So my question is, where am I supposed to post what i.e. feature request, bug report, behavior questions?
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I'm creating this because the answer to   says that Jeff periodically reviews things with a "feature-request" tag.   comment from DVK suggests     ... separate Q from A rep ... allow people who do answer question to have a separate   grading curve—see my    ... as to WHY the curve needs to be different.   Yet, I can find no such "feature-request" tagged item.
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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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There are many, many old posts on meta asking for suggestions on how to better organize favorites.  ,  and , among others.  This is not meant to be an open discussion on how to improve favorites, but rather a specific feature request that I'd like feedback on.      I would love to see a feature added that would let users arbitrarily create "groups" of favorites, and drag individual favorited questions under these groups.  I have about 2 pages of favorites (I know others have much more), and finding an individual one is quite difficult, especially since the specific question title is usually forgotten.  I just added  to my favorites, since I liked Andrew Whitaker's answer, and might want to come back and look at it later; I'd love to add this to a group called, say, "Useful Code".    I've favorited other posts since they had neat tricks in them, or because there were answers written on interesting theoretical computer science topics.  Having different groups for all these areas would be immensely helpful in finding posts later.
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Sometimes you spend a day or more solving a technical problem, and when you finally solve it, you may want to post it on your blog (if you have one) to share with the community.  However, most developers don't have a lot of time to update their blogs, and that is why personal blogs are not ranked very highly on Google/Bing.  So even if you describe a brilliant idea, chances are that, except a few of your friends, nobody will ever find it. This is a common reason why some developers start their blogs and soon give up; it is not interesting to write for the community if you have no feedback on your posts.  Unlike personal blogs, Stack Exchange sites are highly ranked in Google (I was amazed when I saw that a question asked on SO just an hour ago appeared 3rd in my Google search!), so if your question and answer are valuable for others, they will be rated highly and will be visible for other developers.  With this in mind, is it good practice to post a question and answer it yourself immediately when you want to share an idea with the community?
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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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I have recently started using a new device and I am discovering   Just how immensely helpful the various browser caches are on my earlier device for locating duplicates  just how erm, poor the Closing->Duplicate search facility is.    For example On Server Fault we have a close target for licensing questions, it's title is 'Can You help me with my software licensing issue?', there are lots of questions closed as a duplicate of it.    When I enter the full title of the question into the search box it appears 13th on the list. Most of the other questions presented as possible duplicates are in fact already closed duplicates of the one I want to find. This is really not helpful.  It seems to me that improving the sorting such that    If there is a exact match for a title then this Q&amp;A should be presented first.   Questions that are already closed duplicates should be presented after open questions (or not at all).   would be very helpful.
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I regularily encounter questions on StackOverflow which are asked only because of the sole fact that the poster haven't made the effort to google for and the docs of a particular function/class/framework/whatever. My question is, to which category of the five proposed one should I vote when I vote to close the question? Is it: off-topic, not constructive, not a real question, exact dupe or too localized? I tend to be all for 'not a real question' - am I quite right?