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When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid
by endgame 12y ago
When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod.
- benoits 12y agoInstead of the overzealous closing, why doesn't SO create a "Stack Overflow Opinions" Stack Exchange site where they move the offending questions?
- fishtoaster 12y agoI was one of the early mods on programmers.stackexchange.com that was kinda-sorta aimed at being just that. Some participants wanted explicitly that, where offending questions would be automatically moved to P.SE. Others wanted "anything that'd be off-topic on SO" as the key criteria for P.SE. A lot of the early questions there were pulled directly from previously-closed questions on StackOverflow. Over time, though, P.SE drifted away from that model due largely to pressure from the SO/SE leadership. It was made clear that free-form discussion was not what the StackExchange platform was for- it was for answerable questions. And I can understand that. There exist a lot of places on the web to discuss technology (e.g., the one we’re commenting on now). Forums, IRC, blogs, and social media site have been around for a long time. They all sucked as a place to get answers. SO/SE built a better solution, and part of that was a strong anti-discussion bias. It worked, and there is now a great place on the internet to get answers instead of the endless morass of vBulletin sites. I can understand them not wanting to mess with a successful formula.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- teh_klev 12y agoOh boy, P.SE had some seriously bad birthing pains. Speaking as a former diamond mod on Stack Overflow, I got spanked a few times by a particular former and overbearing P.SE mod for migrating what seemed like perfectly on-topic questions that were clearly not great for SO. Eventually I gave up and to this day yet I am still unclear what is considered on/off-topic on P.SE.
- shagie 12y agoBack in April there was some discussion on meta.P.SE about updating the help center ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6590/ http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6590/ ) which resulted in some changes ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6604/ http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6604/ ). There's also a post trying to explain the spirit behind all of the reasons and interpretations (and history of those interpretations) the site has of the different close reasons ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/ http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/ ). If there is still confusion about what is and isn't on topic, asking another meta question or stopping into P.SE's chat room would likely meet with a good reception.
- mlvljr 12y agoThere once was a site named "crap overflow" doing smth like that, I think (or may be smth different, not sure), pity it got closed long ago.