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It seems that a reoccurring theme on ux stack exchange (and other stack exchange sites) are occasional questions that ask for examples of specific practices or requests for some of the best tools for a job.

While I agree that these questions are inappropriate for the Q&A format, I was wondering if it was possible that as part of closing the question with the "Too Broad" reason we could also provide a suggestion for the appropriate place the question can be asked? Perhaps the "Too Broad" special status label could include something such as "This question is too broad for this Q&A site. We recommend asking this question on a site such a Quora."

My intent is to allow our community to not stop at just rejecting inappropriate questions, but to give the asker the opportunity to find what they are looking for. Perhaps it means rewording their UX stack exchange question or perhaps it means asking the question somewhere else.

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What happens when we put a question On Hold for being Too Broad is that we encourage the OP to edit the question in this way:

There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.

So we're not actually stopping. We're helping the OP to understand what needs to be done before the question can be put Off Hold and a good format for our Q&A.

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  • You are right that in some cases, proper restating of the question or refining the question to be more directed would allow the question to come off hold, and there are other instances where the question is useful for UX understanding but cannot be fit within the Q&A format. I am curious if there is a way we can provide assistance for the latter case.
    – Benjamin S
    Jul 1, 2015 at 13:33
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I just answered a question about personas which was later closed for being too broad. As I explained in a comment, I think this is a bad practice: If someone feels he should build personas (or start doing UX in general) and finds UX.SE, we should not send him away with "we're not writing books".

I agree that my (or anyone's) answer can not provide a complete solution, but how should someone new to the field (OP's rep = 2) find out about UX? There's no chance for beginners to "narrow down the question".

Do the questions which are closed as too broad fall into a few categories? Can we provide standard answers to these?

I just feel that we should not send interested novices away without a list of links or books or other references...

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