19

I'd say yes. Software Recommendations has proved to us that while the SE model can support recommendations, there need to be standards in place to prevent the site becoming a "spec my PC for me"-fest. We should have guidelines adapted from SR's. If the work has been done, there's no point wasting it. The guidelines there work, so we should use that. There'...


10

I see nothing wrong with recommending unreleased hardware that is expected to become available in the near future ("wait a week: NVidia's new line of graphics cards will be out, and the GeForce 68040 looks like it'll be what you want"). Unannounced hardware is a different matter. If it hasn't been announced, it effectively doesn't exist, and its ...


10

Copied from https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/356/what-is-required-for-an-answer-to-be-high-quality with major changes for Hardware Recommendations. People answering questions in a manner that is extremely low quality and not very useful for future visitors would be the downfall of this site. These sort of answers can be broken down as ...


8

Official decision Taking into account the answers in this question and the answers here, answers recommending anything (hardware, software, etc.) that isn't directly asked about in the question will be treated just the same as any other answer in terms of content and quality. To use the original situation as an example, if an answer is posted ...


6

Deletion should occur if, and only if, the provided answer doesn't meet guidelines we've set out. There are 3 criteria we've established, at this point: It's not link only/"I Googled this for you"/Answer without explaination It needs to be verbose and explain how/why this meets their requirements It's nicely formatted An alternative can meet all of those ...


6

If you are posting a recommendation, and the hardware pricing is limited to certain regions of the world, that needs to be made clear in the answer. With that, if the question mentions they are in a specific region of the world, the answers should be relevant to that region. A question asking about hardware in Germany isn't assisted by pricing in South ...


6

Questions should (on Stack Exchange in general) be answerable in two-three paragraphs. If you need to write a book for the answer, it's out. That means, straight away, the example question is out: there are hundreds if not thousands of choices when making yourself a PC, and we can't answer all of those in one go. As Gilles says, they should be separate ...


5

On Software Recommendations, we've found that it was best for questions to be focused, and we made precise requirements a strong requirement. HR is already shaping up to be a little different from SR, but from what I've seen so far, the same quality control should apply: questions must formulate precise use cases. That means “quality workstation for under $...


5

I think that, provided you can still make it a good quality answer, "wait for x" shouldn't necessarily be a prohibited answer. It's sort of like "quit this job" answers on Workplace - it's usually well outside the scope of what the OP was considering when they asked the question, but for some questions, it's definitely one option that should be given serious ...


4

Sometimes the answer to a hardware question is software. For example, one answer to "I want a low-budget computer-connected oscilloscope for measuring signals in the kilohertz range" could be "this software oscilloscope permits using your computer's microphone jack as an input". A pure-software answer should be subjected to the same criteria as hardware ...


4

For adaptation of guidelines from SR, some of the changes are obvious - there will rarely be a recommendation that can be implemented or tried out at zero cost (open source equivalent). Others are not so obvious, but are just as important. For example, one immediate change that I think will be needed is the "one recommendation per answer" guideline from ...


4

SR mod Gilles agrees with Undo. Questions: close, with a comment that links to the question guidelines and explains in what way the question falls short and should be improved. Answers: delete, with a comment that links to the answer guidelines and explains in what way the answer falls short and should be improved.


4

I don't see any reason not to include Amazon reviews in an answer, but we have to remember: You should have personal experience with a product before you recommend it. We shouldn't be a site that just searches for the title of the question and throws up an answer with a couple Amazon reviews taped on. We want to have answers from people that have actually ...


3

Adam's answer is spot on, and I'd just like to augment it a little. For questions: there's closing. Or rather, putting on hold. That's the method we have to send a signal that "this post isn't currently up to scratch, but it can be made good". However, I think that when closing, it's incredibly important that we have a comment left along those lines: that ...


3

I don't think a good answer should be "in the future, X might be available." If I'm reading this, I want an answer to: What is the hardware that will address my question, now? not in the future, not maybe, not potentially, but now. Speculative answers are not going to be helpful to that end.


3

In my ideal world, we would warn people that post these through comments, then exactly x hours later delete their answer if they hadn't heeded the warning. In real life, though, this didn't work. In the early days of SR, I had a big Trello sheet of answers that needed deleted at what times... it was terrible. Just deleting them on sight removes a whole ...


3

If you have information or a recommendation to contribute that has the potential to be helpful (to the OP, or to other future readers), err on the side of using an answer rather than a comment. Comments are subject to fairly arbitrary deletion, based on the judgement of the moderator who happens to come across them. Particularly if you have a recommendation ...


2

I'm pretty sure I've posted something similar before, though I thought about it very very hard. A few things I'd consider. Firstly "you might want to wait for a while" is better as a comment. If there was a groundbreakingly big release of hardware coming up or a good reason to wait - I kinda like the pattern I used here. Start with a current ...


2

As long as the answer provides a single, separately valid recommendation, I don't think there's any harm in allowing people to suggest waiting for the next generation of hardware. Put it this way: if you can make a recommendation, do so. That recommendation must adhere to all the normal guidelines and requirements - one or two good recommendations, with ...


2

My $0.02: For questions If a question doesn't live up to our standards, we should close it, preferably as off-topic with our shiny new custom close reason. This allows the question to retain its visibility, and for potential answerers to form potential answers. Edits can take place to specify the question further, and it can be reopened without ...


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