Poll-like questions, policy and hidden privileges

Question

Hello Community,

Since long time, I was a "random visitor" of a "random website" called StackOverflow, stumbling upon interesting and helpful posts when googling for technical solutions. A week ago I decided to jump in to share some of my own experience back, and, I must admit, was quickly hooked by its philosophy and its challenging reputation system (by the way, does SO Users Anonymous exist?).

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Let's get to the point. Several days ago, I posted a question asking people which mixtures of ASP.NET technologies and components they usually use at their jobs and in which context (say, Jquery + MVC + NHibernate for high traffic sites, or Asp.Net Ajax + WebForms + LinqToSql for intranets). Let me say parenthetically, I still believe in the interest of this question: people often discuss differences between separate components ( NHibernate vs iBatis, etc.) and why they use them, but rarely talk about the whole picture.

Several minutes later, my question was downvoted twice, without any explanation. Given my youthful freshness on this site, I thought it was in natural order of things here. A few days later, it was “voted to close” by someone (again, without explanation). At this point, I started to really wonder if my question was in conformity with the local policy, so I reread the FAQ page thoroughly. And yes, objectively speaking, it was not conform to at least 2 rules:

What kind of questions should I not ask here?

1. every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?

2. your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”

Convinced, I voted to close my own question too (it was too late to delete it).

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However (and now we really get to the point), sometimes I see this kind of questions:

• What is the most [...] you've encountered?
• What are the most useful [...]?
• Etc. etc.

Incidentally, many of these questions enjoy a great public interest and originate from, or get participation of highly reputed users. Also, most of them are wikified.

So, what’s the real policy here? Can I still repost my original question, formulating it differently, eventually wikifying it? Or should I post it elsewhere? [troll-mode] Or are there some hidden privileges for some users allowing them to get some immunities? [/troll-mode]

Answer 1

I asked similar question two weeks ago. Check the response and provided links. Policies changed over time.

Answer 2

On Stack Overflow you should steer clear of subjective questions that have no definitive right answer.

The FAQ does say:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

Your question was pretty open ended:

asking people which mixtures of ASP.NET technologies and components they usually use at their jobs and in which context

Now if you were kicking off a project and needed practical advice:

I am starting a project using ASP.NET MVC3, Entity Framework 4.0 and the new Code First components. I am thinking of using MySQL 5 as my database, has anyone used this combination, if so what problems or pitfalls have they encountered?

That's way better than your open ended question which will often result in a glorified list with no real practical information.

There's world of difference between "please tell me all your different setups" and "I am trying to solve X, can I have some suggestions on what tooling I should look at?".

If on doubt read this:

Good Subjective, Bad Subjective by Robert Cartaino