Questions asking for service recommendations

Question

There was a previous discussion about recommending services provided via Tor Hidden Services, which more or less resulted in them being closed as "opinion based". However, this question and others have been worded in such a way that they're not so much opinion based, just asking for services which meet some criteria.

Personally, I feel that these questions should be offtopic on Tor.SE as they don't add any real value, and generally attract spammy, self-promoting answers (the question currently has three such answers deleted, and the others are questoinable at best).

Any takers who think these questions should be on topic? What does everyone think?

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Update: I have tentatively added this as a custom reason when voting to close a question as offtopic after seeing some more spammy answers to a separate service recommendations question earlier. It will not go live as a reason unless the other moderators agree (it's awaiting approval).

Answer 1

Those type of questions are not about tor software \ setup and so on, it's more a hosting type of question. It's a bit of a grey zone I think, but I'm leaning towards the same as you.

Answer 2

My personal opinion is that such question should always be considered as off-topic. Allowing such questions:

1- will make it hard to define a line separating on-topic and off-topic questions of this category.

2- attract the lazy kind of users who prefer to ask in SE rather than use a search engine.

3- get a lot of opinion-based answers that, whether good or bad, have usually a short-term validity due to the short average life of a hidden service.