To be fair, the reason given does seem... reasonable. And the amount of upvotes is probably due to the fact that now it's the most popular answer when you google a similar question.

I mean, I severely dispute the suggestion that fish is not a tool used by programmers, in large part because I am a programmer who uses fish

Yea it seems like a fair question to me, even with those rules. So it should not have been closed.

Doesn't SO have a separate forum for O/S questions tho'? ISTR they have a bunch of different "exchange" verticals... (I'm not disagreeing that SO moderators can be a bit brutal in closing questions -- and they're definitely harder on some techs than others, based on what I hear from friends in other tech communities)

Urk! I didn't realize they had quite so many verticals... https://stackexchange.com/sites

The problem is that the question is not about a shell. The question is about Mac OS.

The frequency with which I google a question and come up with a post with the exact question and answer I need and it is also inexplicably locked is very very high

and has been for as long as I've been coding, which goes back like a decade now

The question is about macOS which would mean it should go on AskDifferent, but a competent answer will mention chsh which is a UNIX tool used by sysadmins, so it would go on ServerFault. But the shell is used by power users, so it’s actually a SuperUser question. Well… unless that power user is on Ubuntu specifically, then you’d probably want to check AskUbuntu. Wait, did I say UNIX-y questions go on ServerFault? No, those belong on the Unix and Linux stack exchange. Maybe they’ve subdivided too far. Someone should make a post on Meta StackExchange about it.

And like, to the point of "but it's in the wrong place", I would ask, "then why can't you just move it to the right one instead of shutting it down?" And for that matter, this one entry in particular I recognize as one I've referenced repeatedly for years (hooray for memory difficulties), so why is it suddenly bad now? For a final bonus, because it's been locked, it's now wrong: Homebrew doesn't install to /usr/local/bin/ anymore, but it will never get updated unless someone re-asks the question, it manages to survive moderation, and it gets enough hits and links for Google results to bump it above the old post. Tech knowledge is now worse because someone had to be pedantic.

That is actually worth posting on meta. That’s bad. That’s bad for the site, that’s bad for the Googlers, and that’s even bad for the long-time users who are checking back.

That's funny, this is exactly the kind of stuff I would expect to find on SO when I google random things.

Maybe set up a Flash Mob to post biting responses to "Why is this off topic?" on SO? (Pile on before someone gets a chance to lock it.)

@U90R0EPHA that'll just get your account(s) suspended...

Well my suggestion was only about 3% serious. 😉 If someone actually took me up on it, I don't really follow why suspension would be likely. (Unless you are misinterpreting the word "biting" to mean "ugly and nasty and disrespectful"?)

I mean the SO moderators are capricious so... "Caveat Poster"...

@U03JPRPTSTX your remark... https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C03RZGPG3/p1662515341009209?thread_ts=1662496847.280769&cid=C03RZGPG3 Well done 😆

This is very solvable by having a single bullet point in StackOverflow FAQ that says: "programmers should only use UIs on MacOS and all other means are blasphemy and will be condemned forever. They are not real tools and they don't exist."

I used to post to SO, but some dude stalked my posts and deleted half of them because those ones referenced tools I built to solve the problem. Apparently, if you are in any way associated with the creation of the solution, even if you're not making any money off of it, you have to explicitly state that you in some way contributed to the solution... I guess I could have gone back and edited those posts, to free readers from the shock of learning, after clicking on a link, that I the poster was in some way related to the content of the link or solution their following, and appealed to have my answers unlocked... But why would I want to do that when these mods are out here stalking people's posts to find edge case rules they can flex on? Waste of time.

Ugh. That sounds like how some subreddits used to interpret self-promotion as "artist posts their own art"

knew a dude who kept having his posts stolen without credit on r/funny so started posting them himself and then got banned for self-promo

Personally, I was not calling out that the solution was originally made by me so as to not self-promote :man-shrugging:

@U050PJ2EU That's weird because one of the most prolific responders to Clojure SO questions constantly posts links to his own GH repos as "answers" including his own curated documentation page, instead of linking to official documentation -- and no one seems to shutdown his answers 😞

I guess if he's saying, in a few places, that it's "his" solution or documentation or something, then it's okay? I dunno

> if you are in any way associated with the creation of the solution ... you have to explicitly state that ... > mods are out here stalking people's posts to find edge case rules they can flex on? > I don't think this is an edge case at all. People on SO are presumably programmers. Programmers tend to build projects to solve problems, which we can reasonably predict they will want to share with others having the same problem. At first glance it's easy to say "it's open source with no profit, so what does it matter?" But lines get very blurry when discussing profit and motive, even when there is no obvious monetary transaction. Should it be okay for Facebook employees to promote GraphQL any time someone asks about coding a REST API? without even disclosing they work for Facebook? What if instead of a megacorp, we have a solo dev whos funding application is currently under review by Clojurists Together? What if we just have someone chasing GitHub Stars to pad their resumé? (I'm ignoring other factors about your particular experience, such as the manner and/or consistency of enforcement of the rule chosen for such a case. Also passing no judgement on whether "full disclosure always" is an ideal solution to the problem above.)

Yeah, just doesn't seem like a coherent rule. Spamming is obviously already not allowed. You can chase GH stars just as easily with a "Made be me" disclaimer. How does a "Made by me" requirement prevent undue open source funding? If anything, it may increase funding. And is FB allowed to spam SO with GraphQL answers, as long as they also say, "Made by us, FB."?? If somebody is spamming a particular solution, sure, that can be evidence of abuse, but when it's the only reference to a particular solution on SO, deleting those solutions because the author happened to make them seems to go against the whole purpose of the platform.

And yeah my particular experience probably boils down to some mod getting some kind of satisfaction from the action, but even when well intended, the rule is just super vague and potentially self-contradictory, wrt what is or isn't self-promotion

I am not plugged in to the SO community so I’m sure there was some reason for them splitting the site into so many verticals, but I have never understood what problem they were trying to solve, and in practice the only impact on me (a casual user of the site) is that increasingly my Google results are polluted with locked questions like this one.