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Mostly on Super User, but not exclusively - there's a lot of these "Must have foos for bar" style questions that are getting huge amounts of answers while the actual useful technical questions that would help people out in a jam are languishing.
I suspect that a lot of it is reputation and/or badge farming, but it's making the Stack Overflow family of sites less and less useful.
Anyone got any ideas on a way to clean them up?
Although these questions can be annoying and really noise, they can be helpful and useful.
I have found a few gems in the "Must Have" Mac OS X Software question, and I am sure others have as well. At least in this case, these questions can be helpful for new users to a particular platform
They are being cleaned up. The one's that are there are legacy and kept for historical reasons and avoid a complete set of repeats. I have monitored this for the last month when I am online and there is maybe one of these once a week, if as much.
If there is one that will add value we will keep it on the site as a CW.
In Short - I don't see the problem with regards to new questions?
If they really bother you flag it for moderator attention or vote to close. If the concern is legit the community will close them quickly enough.
One of the most voted "must have" questions from SuperUser: https://superuser.com/questions/1241/what-are-some-must-have-windows-programs is now illustrating why such thing doesn't match to the SOFU sites.
Sure, it works good for the first two pages, and you have a list of useful software. But with now soon 10 pages, you realize that it's not working anymore. It is really hard to know what was already said or not, and either way, new additions will remain lost at the end, because only a few people will both to look at all pages and vote. Most will see the first page, see their usual programs, eventually add to their scores, but it doesn't matter. People claimed such questions provide a dynamic and evolving list, but this is not true. All you have is a page of most useful software, which won't move anymore.
This question has become a perfect illustration of the reason why such questions are not working on SOFU sites. Even a successful one like that is bound to be only a page of preferred programs, then regular bumps with programs which will never get votes, due to the fact that these sites are not really appropriate for answers on several pages.
