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Closing votes because "This question does not appear to be about DevOps, within the scope defined in the help center." are happening:

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But the What topics can I ask about here? page in the help center only has generic info:

Please look around to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also OK to ask and answer your own question.

If your question is not specifically on-topic for DevOps Stack Exchange, it may be on topic for another Stack Exchange site. If no site currently exists that will accept your question, you may commit to or propose a new site at Area 51, the place where new Stack Exchange communities are democratically created.

Should that content be updated?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Not yet. The scope of the site is still in flux; establishing what sorts of questions "work" here is something that time and experience does a far better job of than anything else.

For now, if you think a question is useful and somehow related to DevOps, ask it; if you see a useful question, answer it. We'll learn fast enough what topics appear on-topic but are not practical here, and which topics constitute the core subject matter of the site - those will be the material from which we'll eventually build the documentation.

See also: Don't anticipate problems.

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    Asking as someone mainly active on SO: should I "forget" about site-specific policies on SO and let this site determine its own set of policies organically? For example: tool recommendation questions.
    – Stijn
    Feb 28, 2017 at 22:51
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    You can't leave your memories at the door even if you wanted to, @Stijn. Instead, try to remember why we do things the way we do them elsewhere... And if you don't know, find out before you blindly repeat the rituals here. Tool recommendations are often useful questions, but they still need to focus on an actual problem and the answers need to solve that problem. The issue we were unable to overcome on SO was a long history of folks asking for the "best" library, with aging answers and circling wakes of spammers trying to feed off of the rotting corpses; that doesn't have to happen.
    – Shog9
    Feb 28, 2017 at 23:27
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    Solid advice, thanks. It's easy to forget why we do things, after a while.
    – Stijn
    Feb 28, 2017 at 23:51
  • While this is all well and good I am a software developer and I'm not really sure what devops means. Its not a phrase I use generally and would generally class it as a buzzword rather than a technical phrase. The fact that it is the name of this stack exchange site suggests that I am wrong in this but it means when I get here (and I got here via a Hot network question) I have no idea what sort of questions should be asked here. Wikipedia seems to define devops though is pretty broad in what it suggests it covers. Shouldn't at least a rough statement of what this site is for appear somewhere?
    – Chris
    Apr 15, 2017 at 23:54
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    I wrote this when the site was still in (early!) private beta, @Chris. It's likely high time for the current users of the site to be adding some guidance... But see also: Do we need a question to define what is behind the term "DevOps"?
    – Shog9
    Apr 17, 2017 at 23:09
  • @Shog9 the future is calling back into 2017. 2.5 years on the world is still intact, but the old What topics can I ask about here? page as well ... the main point of my question is, however, why the close options for off-topic are so limited when there is no definition of on-topic. It's also perfectly fine for these definitions to evolve over time. Shouldn't the basics be there at least for now?
    – 0xC0000022L
    Dec 14, 2019 at 22:45

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