@DavidZaslavsky What's our policy for [software] questions? They seem to be allowed, but I'd close quite a few as off-topic myself. I'm asking since we may want to decide if they are allowed on chem.SE
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Should software questions be on-topic? They aren't exactly expert-type questions. They're something which chemists know about, but unrelated to chemistry concepts. They can get good answers here--but are they good for the site?
Physics seems to allow them, though I per...
Whoops. While discovering room-owner features I accidentally pinned Shog9's message about revhistory. And I thought I unpinned it, but that didn't work out due to a bad Net connection :/ . Fixed now :)
Oooh, I can remove all stars from posts!
(no, I'm not testing that, I don't think it can be undone) ;-)
I see that Astronomy beta was merged into Physics, however, many of my questions are now untagged.
Is there some way we can get all the tags on Astronomy moved over to Physics and applied to the questions that were migrated?
@Manishearth it depends on the question. Mostly we would send such questions to Computational Science, or perhaps Super User. But there might be some specific cases in which the question is okay here. It would have to be focused on the physics, and just using the software as a tool.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of the existing software questions we have are off topic.
To me, these questions are problematic not in themselves, but because they tend to be very broad, suggestive or argumentative. By its nature, a question that can be answered by 15 equally valid answers is not going to be very useful. For example, I consider the following questions unsuitable for the site:
What Linux software can I draw 2D molecules with? I can't pay for Accelrys Materials Studio, what is a free equivalent? What planewave-based DFT software should I use?
I would think the following would be suitable:
I have issue X with drawing software Y, which doesn't export to format Z. What alternatives exist that fit this use case? I can't buy Materials Studio and its advanced GULP version, how are its features different from those of the academic version X.Y? I want to perform planewave-based DFT calculations for 13-C NMR prediction, does any free software package have this functionality?
So, my proposal would be:
not considering them off-topic intrinsically being extra-careful about the other criteria for questions: fact-based, specific questions. if a few answers pop up suggesting different software that could be equally valid, merge them into a community wiki answer.
Oh, uh... I don't know about that, I would think at least the first two out of that list are off topic for us. We made this decision some time ago with knowledge of the fact that Computational Science exists to take pretty much all these questions.
...oh, I guess what you quoted was from Chemistry.SE?
To me, these questions are problematic not in themselves, but because they tend to be very broad, suggestive or argumentative. By its nature, a question that can be answered by 15 equally valid answers is not going to be very useful. For example, I consider the following questions unsuitable for ...
Sometime later I can take a look at our existing software questions here and say something more specific. But the gist of it, I would say, is that we prefer most software questions to head to computational science.
Naw, they put all the data together in a nice spreadsheet, I just need to get it into a good format for posting on meta. Half-tempted to just link to the spreadsheets.
Sparked by this question.
Should software questions be on-topic? They aren't exactly expert-type questions. They're something which chemists know about, but unrelated to chemistry concepts. They can get good answers here--but are they good for the site?
Physics seems to allow them, though I per...
I see that Astronomy beta was merged into Physics, however, many of my questions are now untagged.
Is there some way we can get all the tags on Astronomy moved over to Physics and applied to the questions that were migrated?
