What kinds of questions should I avoid asking here?

Question

This post is a supplement to the Help Center Article of the same name. That article, in a nutshell, describes questions that are either too broad, too opinionated, or too discussion-oriented to make good questions.

This article describes the specific categories of questions that you should avoid asking. Where can you ask them instead? Try The Whiteboard, if you have 20 reputation or more.

Coding help

If you need help writing or troubleshooting code (or using the tools), ask your question on Stack Overflow, not here. Read "What topics can I ask about" before you ask your question there.

Review my design

We don't review entire software designs; that's a discussion, not a question. If you have a specific question about your software design, ask that.

What is the name of this thing?

Questions that ask us to name things or provide word definitions are just requests for search engine help, which we don't provide here.

Which way is best?

The way that best satisfies your software's requirements.

Because you already understand the detailed specifications for your software project, you are in the best position to answer the question "Which way best meets my functional and non-functional software requirements?"

If you can clearly define what "best" means to you specifically without simply restating "best," then your question might be suitable for asking here. Otherwise, you're just trotting after a herd.

Convince my boss/coworker

We're not here to help you win your argument.

Customer service

If you have a question about how a company or organization's product is licensed, priced, serviced, released, etc., ask the company.

Legal Advice or Licensing

Ask a lawyer, or one of our sister sites like Law or Open Source.

Where do I find...?

We don't help people find things here. We don't know where you can find that highly obscure paper/product/whatever. You have access to the same tool we do, which is Google.

What do you recommend?

We don't make product, service or technology recommendations of any kind. Try here or here, but read their Help Center first.

What should I learn?

We don't know that. We can't predict the future, and your personal circumstances are too specific to make a good question that can benefit everyone.

Is [technology] popular/dead?

We don't know that either. Even if we did, any answer we provide would become useless a week from now.

Answer 1

Upon skimming your headers to see if they would apply to my questions, my first instinct was to think wait some of those are actually on-topic! until I read your detailed notes. Perhaps we could clarify some of the header areas?

Review my design

We don't review entire software designs; that's a discussion, not a question. If you have a specific question about your software design, ask that.

Gut response was "Wait we do offer opinions on software design!" but the final line does cover that. Perhaps we could make the header specific to generic design reviews, like Generic feedback on my entire software design?

Which way is best?

The way that best satisfies your software's requirements.

Because you already understand the detailed specifications for your software project, you are in the best position to answer the question "Which way best meets my functional and non-functional software requirements?"

If you can clearly define what "best" means to you specifically without simply restating "best," then your question might be suitable for asking here. Otherwise, you're just trotting after a herd.

Once again, my gut response on reading the header was "Asking which way is better in regards to performance/memory use/readability/etc is on-topic!", but see that is covered in the final line of the description. Perhaps header can be changed to something like Which way is best (with no clarification of what "best" means to you)?

What do you recommend?

We don't make product, service or technology recommendations of any kind. Try here or here, but read their Help Center first.

A lot of questions here ask "What do you recommend" without being about a specific product/service/technology/etc. We should specify that in the header line, like What Product|Service|Technology|etc do you recommend?"

The idea is that most people won't read the entire post line-by-line, but will rather scan the headers to see if each section would apply to their question. If they think it does, perhaps they'll read the detailed part. Clarifying the headers would help prevent the whole "this is stupid, why am I even bothering" response when something is taking too long online, and would probably increase the success rate with users that actually read and retain the information.

And last of all on this section

Name that thing
Questions that ask "Is there a name for this thing" are just requests for Google help, which we don't provide here.

I thought based on the last meta post I saw about this, "Name that thing" is on-topic providing it was not a "What should I name this thing/class/object/etc" type of question.

I know from experience, that often being a new programmer there are a great number of terms we just don't know, and it is very hard to find the "proper" term with Google. Once we do find the right term though, it's very easy to google what you need to know, so find this category very useful as a new programmer, or even as an experienced programmer learning a new area.