Are service questions on topic?

Question

Been noticing today especially a lot of people are asking us for services that they can go to, to find specific needs. To my knowledge of the help and tour pages, asking for services are considered off topic. Should I be marking these to close? The other problem with them is that they tend to be opinionated as everyone will recommend something they think is good but there is no definitive answer to it.

Answer 1

Asking for recommendations to a specific thing is a problem because specific recommendations go out of date with time. It's also a question to which there's no specific, canonical answer possible, so it's not a good fit for the Stack Exchange Q&A engine.

However, there's no reason people can't simply ask for what features to look for in a thing. In other words, rather than "can anyone recommend a good proofreader" we'd encourage people to ask something more like "what do I look for in a proofreader".

This is pretty similar to the shopping recommendation problem that Stack Exchange encountered early on.

As to what to do with these questions: You can vote to close, but it'd be even better if you can edit or submit edits that improve the question. (You can also vote to close, pending edits to the question.) If there are already answers, just flag the question for attention and we can clean those up. If it's particularly complicated, we can start a meta thread about it and decide what to do as community.