Welcome to the Power Users community on Codidact!
Power Users is a Q&A site for questions about the usage of computer software and hardware. We are still a small site and would like to grow, so please consider joining our community. We are looking forward to your questions and answers; they are the building blocks of a repository of knowledge we are building together.
Would questions about software systems design limitations be on-topic here?
A user suggested that Why most hosting providers support ticket systems allow text only (no formatting)? might be on-topic here. It is quite clear that it is offtopic on Software Development.
It is an interesting question (its body might be improved though), but I am not sure if it would be a good fit on Power Users Codidact.
Generally speaking, I am interested if questions about the rationale or limitations of software systems design should be on-topic in this community.
1 answer
If it is possible that someone who isn't a developer of that software (or such software) can objectively answer the question, then I think it would be on-topic.
If answers involve speculation about the developer's rationale or in case there are no sources to be found explaining why the software was designed in a certain way, then I don't think it is suitable for any Codidact site.
Questions asking why a certain feature is missing from software seems kind of impossible to answer without speculation. The question you refer to is just like that. Another example: "Why doesn't MS Teams have a push-to-talk button? All gamer VoIP software have this since some 20 years back." It's a reasonable question to ask, but can only be answered by Microsoft, so it is a bad fit for any Q&A site.
Also such questions are easily "rant in disguise" - my example above could be just that. I could as well have asked "Are the designers of this product ******, have they truly never experienced open mic, have they never used computers before, why didn't they look at existing software before releasing this ****?". Which isn't very nice, it likely violates our Code of Conduct, but fills the very same purpose - ranting. And the poster isn't really expecting any sensible answer, they just want to vent their frustration or badmouth a certain product.
1 comment thread