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There used to be a very popular question on Stack Overflow called Surprise for a programmer on Birthday, but it got deleted. It had a bunch of suggestions for humorous code snippets and other jokes to put on a programmer's birthday cake, and I was planning to post pictures of the cake I just made with inspiration from some of those suggestions. It seems obvious to me that posting something on Stack Overflow is just going to get deleted, but is there somewhere else in the network that it would fit? Perhaps Programmers.SE? The cooking site doesn't seem like a good fit because there's nothing particularly challenging or interesting in the actual cooking.

Just to be clear, I want to create a page with a question like, "What are some fun ideas for decorating a programmer's birthday cake?"

If you want to see the content of the old page, it's available on Stack Printer.


Until fun.stackexchange.com is launched, it has no home here, so I posted it on my blog.

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Thanks for including the Stack Printer link. If you want to know if something will be acceptable on Programmers SE, though, you should probably ask on Meta Programmers, not here. –  Pops May 14 '11 at 3:02
Good suggestion, @Popular, I have now asked on Programmers' meta site. I also clarified this version of the question to be "is there a home somewhere?" rather than just "is programmers the home?" –  Don Kirkby May 14 '11 at 5:09
For the record here, I don't think the question would be a good fit for Programmers and explained my reasoning in the post on Meta.Programmers.SE. –  Anna Lear May 14 '11 at 5:40

1 Answer 1

up vote 10 down vote accepted

Unfortunately, I don't think that question would fit anywhere on the network at this time.

Of course the question is preserved for historical reasons in any of the creative commons mirrors of our data, and our very own network data dumps as well.

For rationale, see Stack Overflow: Where We Hate Fun, but the TL;DR decision point is:


That's the crux of it.

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I really don't see why a question which is widely popular and targeted at programmers cannot have some place on the stack exchange network (be it locked, on programmers or whatever). A lot of people, (myself included), program because it is fun, not just because its a job, in fact most of the questions that I ask are for personal projects rather than for work. Is it really so inappropriate that it needs to be purged, deleted and relegated to archives and 3rd party sites? –  Justin May 14 '11 at 6:23
@kragen I know it seems harsh, but allowing it leads to a lot of "oh, you allowed this, so why can't I..." whining and de-facto broken windows. It can belong somewhere, but not here. –  Jeff Atwood May 14 '11 at 9:00
Maybe the promise of cake will motivate people to support fun.stackexchange.com. If not, you can see photos on my blog‌​. –  Don Kirkby May 18 '11 at 6:27

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