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Comment by jmnicolas | Hacker News Reader

Before even clicking the SO link, I knew this question was closed as off-topic ...

How about they make a dedicated space in SO where this kind of questions are allowed.

I don't mean a free for all, but a heavily moderated part where you can ask recommendations from your peers about the best framework / book etc as long as it's related to programming.

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It's been there for ages: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

Edit: Although it would be great if SO suggested moving discussions there, instead of just closing as off-topic. You can close-move questions that belong to superuser.com for example.

Why don't they move the question instead of just closing it?

You've got very limited options when moderating SO unfortunately. When you want to mark the post as belonging to other SE site, the only options are:

- meta.stackoverflow.com - superuser.com - tex.stackexchange.com - dba.stackexchange.com - sharepoint.stackexchange.com

Which is an... interesting set of choices. I'm not sure why you can't suggest others. I'd really like to migrate to programmers.SE. Otherwise the only option is to actually close as off-topic.

THe list of choices you can vote to move to is based on where questions are migrated most of the time. Moderators can still move the question wherever they want, just flag for attention and give a custom message to that effect.

Is that the ability of the diamond-by-the-nick mods only? http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges?tab=all doesn't list it explicitly and it's definitely not a part of "access to moderator tools".

Correct. Site (diamond) moderators can move a question to any stackexchange site of their choice. Source: I'm a moderator for http://android.stackexchange.com

Are you sure ?

Here's what they say :

Don't ask about...

1) general workplace issues, office politics, etc.

2) implementation issues or programming tools

3) Anything not directly related to software development

4) Questions that are primarily opinion-based

5) Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer

I need 2, 4 and 5 to be able to ask "what's the best web stack for [my use case]" ...

Well, around half of the questions on programmers.se break at least 2,4,5 without any issues. Like "How to manage accidental complexity in software projects", "Why would I use Angular?", "Would Python be too slow for client-side use in Browsers?", etc. I've never seen a similar question closed on programmers.se, even they don't respect all of those points.

It's been around for ages perhaps, but for a long time has not caught on. Most of the time when I search google for a question that might be appropriate for programmers.stackexchange.com, I wind up with links to locked topics on stackoverflow instead. None of them even include references to SE:programmers. The difference in site volume is telling as well. Quantcast gives stackoverflow 11.4 million uniques per month, while programmers.stackexchange is only 400,000.

The distinction seems clear from 60,000 feet but sorting edge cases seems to depend largely on capricious and arbitrary moderation. And practically speaking, in many cases you would actually get better answers on stackoverflow, but for the oppressive moderation.

I used to be pretty heavily involved with the meta of p.se early on. The policy you suggest is exactly what SO users really wanted, but p.se rejected the idea because it would mean that they would become a dumping ground for bad SO questions. It actually became a bit of a dumping ground before implementing some very aggressive moderation.

> but a heavily moderated part where you can ask recommendations from your peers about the best framework / book etc as long as it's related to programming.

This has been asked before on HN and my response is generally "no". First, the idea of SO is that it provides a QA format so that you can reference it later. If you watch Spolsky's talk about how they built the community for SO was built, he specifically mentions "SO is not for the person answering the question or the person asking the original question, it's for the hundreds of other people who ask the same question a hundred times again". In theory this means if I want to know how to (example) "split an array in Ruby v1.9" the answer is and always will be "<insert answer>". Your answer to "here are my requirements for a new facebook startup, tell me what frameworks work best" is going to go in 100 directions and even if one answer is "the best" it doesn't mean 3 years from now that that answer will still be true. If you think about it you can easily see how much of a wasteland that would become.

But it's just these kinds of qualitative discussions that people crave to make major decisions on project directions. Without a quality discussion of pros and cons for different scenarios how are you to make a reasoned decision? Thousands of people probably have these kind of questions versus the smaller number for very esoteric problems. Time invalidates whole classes of answers as new releases are rolled out. SO should make a space for these kind of purposes, even if that is a separate space.

Which is effectively Quora's stance on this whole idea. Do you think this is useful? https://www.evernote.com/shard/s12/sh/8a16e553-3a10-476a-8f1...

EDIT: To answer your question - the only way you can make a well thought and clear decision is to implement the system yourself.

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