Why are you closing so many questions? Clearly they're drawn to questions FOR or ABOUT programmers, and are general enough to be related to 'programmers'. Why is time management not allowed to be posted, for example? There's tag for "time-management", clearly, this is within scope.
My question had +2 and been fav'd. Clearly people want to know best time manager for programmers in OSX.
You're operating outside of the FAQ. Mark Trapp, and other mods, chill out.
As ChrisF mentioned, questions need to invite some unique insight from programmers beyond just a simple "I'm asking programmers" clause. In terms of possible scope, we want to hit the blue area of this diagram:
Additionally, real questions invite answers, not ideas, opinions, or lists. From our FAQ:
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.
If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about
_____”, then you should not be asking here. (You are more than welcome to have such discussions in our real time web chat.) However, if your motivation is “I would like others to explain______to me”, then you are probably OK.To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …
- every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite
______?”
I closed it as off-topic per these guidelines: Stack Exchange is not well suited for generating lists of recommendations.
However, after looking around, I found we had an earlier round that I thought might be helpful (even if it happened to have been closed), so I changed the close reason to exact duplicate to provide a link back to the earlier question.
As others have noted, it's probably a better fit for Productivity.SE or even Project Management.SE, but the guidelines about open-ended questions are a network-wide thing, and lists of recommendations are off-topic everywhere, not just on Programmers.SE.
Further reading:
Also check out Frequently closing popular questions, where the idea that the guidelines in place shouldn't apply to popular questions was discussed.
Just because there's a tag doesn't make the question on topic.
I could create the tag "caving" on Stack Overflow as I have more than 1,500 reputation on the site (source) and ask about caving and potholing. It doesn't make the question on topic.
I know it's an extreme example, but the applying the same logic if any user with more than 1,500 reputation asks a question that requires a new tag, any tag, does that make it on topic?
Also the tag could well date from the beta period when the reputation required to create tags was much less - 150 reputation in fact (source) and what we considered to be on and off topic different to what it is today.
To answer your specific issue with time-management questions - these do not uniquely affect software developers. Anybody who works where they have multiple, equally important tasks to do requires good time management skills.
This is the complete text of your question:
Best simplest project / todo manager for programmers in OSX
I'm trying to figure out the best project / todo manager.
I am a single programmer, working on a single project in spare time.
I've tried using TextEdit (notepad), I've tried big project managers, they're too cumbersome with due dates, start dates, etc. I spend more time organizing what's next and how it's linked with everything else than actually programming / testing.
I need some suggestions. Right now I'm using TaskPaper, which gets the job done very well, but am open for others' suggestions. It has to be for OSX.
This is explicitly covered in https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask
To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …
- every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”
- your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”
Your question has the "every answer is equally valid" and the "What do you use? I'll go first" problems, which are listed above.
Typically its not just the moderator's input that goes into closing a post. Users have the ability to input on these kinds of issues. If I've understood correctly in the last several months that I've been on here, moderators go a lot based on the input of other users on matters of this nature. There are strict guidelines (though programmers.SE is much more lenient on the guidelines than other SE sites) for the purpose of keeping the site more useful in the long run than forum sites can be.
How about if there's some kind of check-balance system. If a question has enough upvotes / favs, then mods can't just close it at will. Even with the upvotes and being favd, it was immediately closed as off-topic (and then changed to dupe). Keep in mind, dupes don't apply when time has passed and previous suggestions might now be obsolete. So maybe only being able to mark as dupe for time difference of 6 months (stacked). Meaning, can't dupe something that wasn't asked in last 6 months, unless there's a connecting duplicate.
