Comment by EvilTerran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EvilTerran | Hacker News Reader

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Likewise. I usually only end up searching the web-in-general for answers when the product documentation doesn't help. When that's led me to stackexchange, more often than not the threads asking my exact question have been closed as "too general" or similar.

The most recent example, in my case, was:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166086/good-examples-of...

"Can anybody recommend some [PHP] programs for me to look at, that promote best practises, but are simple enough for me to understand?"

"closed as not a real question; It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. [no it's not] This question is ambiguous [nope], vague [no], incomplete [er, no], overly broad [no], or rhetorical [still no] and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form [no again]. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it [mmm, passive-agression]."

... er, WTF guys? Given the minefield that is trying to write good PHP, it's a very good question. A couple of good answers had, I note, already been given, which puts the lie to the mods' reasoning -- but they killed it off anyway, even though it was showing promise? Really?

Reeks of power-tripping or jobsworthy moderation to me.

In my opinion, that IS an ambiguous question. Not in the sense that it's hard to understand approximately what you're looking for, but that it's not obvious how to choose the right answers. I agree that this kind of moderation can be a bit heavy-handed, but I think one of the goals of SO is to have provably correct solutions to questions, not an "answer wiki" like Quora. You can't really "accept the right answer" to this question in any fair way.

I wouldn't say "ambiguous". I'll grant you "subjective".

Does stackexchange forbid questions where there's an element of opinion, because the system's set up only for questions with "one right answer"? That seems awfully restrictive in the name of a system limitation.

Especially as, as 4ad observed, the asker chooses an incorrect answer annoyingly often -- so the "best answer" isn't always actually the best. As such, it's advisable to at least flick through the other answers anyway, despite this rule.

No, opinion is welcome (on Stack Exchange, not necessarily on Stack Overflow) but it needs to be backed up by research or fact.

That's not the problem on the sample question.

> You can't really "accept the right answer" to this question in any fair way.

I see that as the issue - that there has to be one answer. It's a site that promotes the same issue that plagues reddit, the hunger for karma.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. The mods are power crazed and addicted to closing questions. If people are answering, and upvoting those answers, or the question, then the question is worthy and shouldn't be closed. End of story.

SO is still awesome, but flawed. And their mod system suffers from the same problem that has plagued every mod'ed site: mod convergence, essentially turning the site into their own echo chamber, and stagnating it.

It also seems like they have a lot of help vampires as I see many questions where the correct answer doesn't have even a single upvote.

The post has two other questions:

what are the best practices when it comes to PHP?

And are there recommended ways of tackling certain task?

And these are, I believe, ambiguous, vague and overly broad (not to mention subjective).

Also the third question, the one you quote, is actually a yes/no question that would be pointless to answer. So, assuming that's not the real question... what is? I believe it IS difficult to tell what is being asked here.

StackExchange is just not meant for discussion, I think. At last not as it is right now.

The one I quoted is a yes/no question only if you ignore the norm of answering "Can anybody recommend [thing]?" as if it were "What examples of [thing] do you know of?". That's obviously the intention behind the question -- if you asked your waiter "Can you recommend a wine?", and s/he replied only "yes", that'd make hir both pedantic and deliberately unhelpful.

And the existence of the other questions is beside the point -- the title of the question is "Good examples of PHP code for an intermediate PHPer?", the body is merely exposition. I only quoted the equivalent question from the body because it had better grammar than the title.

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