Possibly clarify the "shopping" OT closure rule

Question

Appropriate closure?

This closed question below (OT, the "shopping" issue) wasn't actually asking for reviews of commercial electronic devices, or for component purchase recommendation. The OP, a pro designer, did describe his situation and specific problem: publishing of electronic tutorials on EE stackexchange vs. a personal blog vs. github etc. It's not circuit design, yet is a question for electrical engineers, and about our narrow topic, mostly because OP has found appropriate forums do already exist for SWE and other non-EE fields, just not for EE.

Where to publish articles about electronics?

Motivation: I'd like to read a pro EE forum, not just a purely circuit-design forum. Avoid heavy-handed application of anti-shopping rule. (So, allow reviews of oscilloscopes and sig-gens? Nah, those are physical objects being sold. Don't attract a crowd of paid socks from scope companies!)

• WJB, long on EE, new on Meta

Answer 1

Although there isn't a clear pre-written close reason, requests for off-site info are almost always downvoted and/or closed here, and 'answers' which do little more than direct you to an external URL are dealt with similarly.
In addition, the question you refer to is simply not about electronics, or even engineering of any sort - it's about 'where can I publish my stuff', which just happens to be about electronics.
I didn't see it or VTC, but I would have. In this particular case I'd probably have used the 'opinion based' reason or possibly written a custom one, but I'd still definitely have VTC. This is not a 'forum', it's a Q&A site - this kind of question just isn't a good fit for Stack Exchange.

IMO your edit to remove the OP's

I understand that this question is only laterally related to electronics, but I think it may be of interest to other fellow electronic engineers.

doesn't make the question any more on-topic than it was before.

To address your point regarding the 'comment-answers' suggesting that the OP use EE.SE to publish - this has been asked & answered here on meta many times already, and the consensus has always been that there is no problem with asking a question on a particular topic with the intention of immediately self-answering it.
Asking questions that you will eventually self-answer
Posting a question and answer it yourself
Self-answering questions as a form of tutorial
But even (another) question about doing that belongs here in meta and not on the main SE site because it's a question about the site, not a question about EE.
There's no amount of editing which would make this question on-topic for the main site, and IMO any editing to make it on-topic here in meta would only result in it being closed as a duplicate of any of the 3 or more existing similar questions here.

Answer 2

My question is not about «seeking recommendations for specific products or places to purchase them»:

• It does not concern any physical object.
• It does not concern any money being exchanged.
• It is not about reviewing a site, a service or a brand.
• It is not about comparing two providers

My question is specific, yet not product related: «If Software Engineers can use well-known services like geeksforgeeks and medium to publish their articles, where can Electronics Engineers go to do the same»?

• I believe that the pull for writing is present in many engineers, including the non-software genre.
• Therefore I believe that the answer to this question would not become quickly obsolete.

Finally, it's also not a generic question about how to publish stuff on internet, but rather about the need of a community content platform publishing Electronics related articles, not in a form of question-and-answer:

• Anyone can set up a web site and publish a blog.
• But, as pointed in the question, the real challenges are referencing, searching, moderating comments and ensuring security.
• Not dealing with those challenges is what makes sites like geekforgeeks attractive to software engineers, who are just as apt as me in setting up a Wordpress web site, but prefer not to.

Sadly, medium and geekforgeeks are not suitable for articles about electronics because they don't address this kind of public, plus they don't support mathematical equations or circuit drawing.

In conclusion, I don't see how answering my question would harm in any way the reputation of stack exchange. On the contrary, I believe it could raise a healthy debate about why Electronics Engineers can't publish their stuff like other engineers do.

Answer 3

If all agree with this closure (ed.: for shopping-rule violation,) then instead I propose that our anti-shopping rule needs to be edited to clarify that we must block a constant unwanted stream of users asking about ...how to self-publish EE books? ...how to create EE tutorials? ...online SERVICES for the pro EE community, rather than just electronic products? These are EE topics, but if they are known to cause "shopping" problems (attract seller sockpuppet postings, or to expand and push out circuit-design,) then we must declare them Electrical Engineering, yet OT. But I cannot see how this is actually a continuing problem here. And, important, the OP isn't part of the, heh ravening hoards of beginners just itching to post hundreds questions/day identical to the closed question above.

If instead the shopping rule were to forbid only reviews of commercial physical objects (while including language to specifically avoid banning discussions of such things as competing engineering texts/tutorials, shopping for EE CAD sw, etc.) then is there a problem? Will the forum soon become choked by such questions? If not, then why not allow them, since they're EE questions after all (just not circuit-design.)

If the whole point of anti-shopping is to ban advertisers dishonest sock-postings, and to halt thousands of non-EE questions about product reviews, then "shopping" isn't actually the enemy, and heavy-handed application of the rule will also block many legit EE questions. I see the actual problem as being shopping-questions about "electronics," meaning physical objects with money involved. Ban only that, specifically allow shopping for non-electronic non-objects, and then we won't accidentally close EE discussions like the one above.