Why was this question: https://superuser.com/q/451805/101850 closed? I don’t see anthing offtopic with it. It’s about computer software.

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It's a software recommendation that isn't formulated well. It's asking "Is there software that does X?" instead of asking "How do I do X?" Looking at the answer also shows that it's not a very good question, as it only suggests of a specific software, and not exactly how to solve the problem at hand.

Here are some related Meta question/Answers for further reading:

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  • Please see if it's any good now. – kinokijuf Jul 23 '12 at 14:50
  • @kinokijuf It's still lacking IMO. There just isn't that much detail. – James Mertz Jul 23 '12 at 14:54

I'm guessing the close-voters considered the question to be a shopping recommendation. If you read this question, asking for a recommendation for a specific product is shopping, even if that product happens not to cost any money.


To address , I'd read through the links from KronoS. I've not interacted with the tag much in the past, but it seems that there are certain ways of phrasing these sorts of questions which are more or less constructive for the site which results in lots of questions on that tag being closed. For example, I was very interested in Text To Speech Software suggestion for Dyslexic, which seemed well-phrased to me, and the user Reid asked the very same question as you. But the question was mod-closed, and slhck provided a link to a discussion on the issue of software recs:

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  • So why do we have the software-rec tag? – kinokijuf Jul 23 '12 at 14:54
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    @kinokijuf Because the policies have been different back then and they're now (finally) applied more consistently. – slhck Jul 23 '12 at 15:02
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    Pretty much the Software-rec tag is the overpopulated red-headed step child of Super User. Eventually we'll nuke it. – James Mertz Jul 23 '12 at 15:13

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