New answers tagged discussion
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The policy to fast-delete any post that falls into one of the off-topic reasons has existed for several years now and was based on a suggestion from one of the Community Managers. I believe the context was improving the quality of the homepage to users who are not logged in or who have low reputation, around the time of refining our scope, perhaps even ...
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Unfortunately, the dont-ask page, where the "backed up with facts and references" line comes from, is not editable. However, I don't see a contradiction here.
Questions should not ask for resources, including articles, blog posts, books, or papers. Instead, the question should be focused on a problem that someone is facing. When writing answers, ...
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I am pretty sure the question was closed because it explicitly asked for a paper. Many of our community members interpret that "off-topic" reason very literally, regardless if the question would be ok without such a request. This is surely debatable, since I often see good answers for software-engineering questions which have an increased value ...
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Actually the answer is in Doc's first linked answer:
It has become almost impossible to ask a question without getting one or two downvotes at least.
Frankly, I didn't know that. If I did, I wouldn't be "complaining loud and harshly about getting some virtual minus points". And since we are talking about that, I am disappointed to see that people ...
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The Help Center article What topics can I ask about here? says:
Some questions, even if they appear to fit into one of the above categories, may still be off-topic:
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Product or service recommendations, including tools, libraries or packages, programming languages, books, scholarly papers, tutorials, articles, or blogs
Algorithms are not mentioned ...
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This blog article by Jeff Atwood from the time when this site was called "Programmers.Stackexchange" had a core statement which is IMHO valid today:
In a nutshell, Stack Overflow is for when you’re front of your compiler or editor working through code issues. Programmers [ed: Softwareengineering] is for when you’re in front of a whiteboard working ...
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