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Interesting choice of questions.

Neither of which have an answer. Unless you want to discuss the fine details of the problem. In which case I'll hire your site to do the architecture for free next time I have a major project.

Questions like that aren't unanswerable. They are however unanswerable without knowing a lot about your specific case (requirements, skills, staff, infrastructure, etc). So they tend not to be QA because they either get surface treatment (leading people to make bad decisions on partial information) or they lead to abuse (people taking advantage of it).




Questions like that aren't unanswerable.

If by "answerable" you mean "have one, and one one, unique, correct, objectively verifiable answer, which can be determined using only the provided information". But this kind of definition of "answerable", while fairly close to what SO uses, is overly rigid and eliminates the potential of a lot of valid, useful, and insightful discussion and commentary.

I understand where SO are coming from in having such a rigid definition of "answerable", and it's their site and they can run it however they see fit. But I see no reason to maintain, in the broader sense, that a Q&A site can't adopt a different position, which recognizes that the value of many questions is not in finding one, and one one, unique, correct, and objectively verifiable answer, but is rather in the discussion itself.

So I guess what I'm saying is... SO has it's place, but a similar site that uses a different model also has it's place. IOW, the SO model is not the one and only valid model for a technical Q&A site.




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