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In Apache Ant or GNU Make survey the asker is apparently carrying out an Ant v. Make research smackdown.
To me this looks like spam, but seems harmless. Should anything be done?
Is there a policy on canvassing the community in this way? Is it allowed?
As an aside, it seems like the OP would get more views with some language tags, rather than what's on there now...
I didn't mean this to be spam, sorry if it appeared to be or if it was otherwise unwelcome.
I have to do a research project and wanted some data from people who would have come across and used build tools. I could ask some of my friends/peers too, but most of them are not interested in software development or do not have experience with build tools.
I chose this as my area of research as the sample questions the lecturer gave us to choose from did not interest me and I thought I could do better on the assignment if I chose a altogether different subject. I became interested in Apache Ant after working with GNU Make and working on a little project to create my own cross-platform build tool, written for the JVM in Scala, Java and Groovy. (http://github.com/stpettersens/Gaudi).
I can assure you that I'm not in this for the money or to purposely spam, I'm just a Computing undergraduate with an interest in software development. I do appreciate the situation in that maybe I should have asked on the chats. If its the consensus not to canvas, I will respect that and not post any surveys again.
Thanks.
I flagged it as spam. Just because it's academic doesn't mean he can post a solicitation on SO. Imagine if more people did this.
If I had close votes left, I'd go with "Not a real question". If the user account were created just for posting this question, I'd consider flagging it as spam as well, but that doesn't seem to be the case here -- the user seems to be trying to participate in the community in good faith.
The format of the site is to have questions and answers. With the way he currently has it formatted, there is nothing to answer or say about it. I would say that might need to be closed and re-direct him to the chat rooms. But, he does only have 11 reputation.
His intentions may very well be good, but I would say it is not for Stack Overflow. Maybe it needs to go to programmers.stackexchange as a community wiki type of question? It should be closed as "not a real question" or "spam" as it stands on Stack Overflow.
