Is a "Does X exist?"-type question a product recommendation?

Question

We have had a lot of questions closed as product recommendations. I feel that this is appropriate when somebody asks "What is the best X?", while there is a multitude of options.

However, when somebody asks a "Does X exist?"-type question, should it be closed as a product recommendation?

An example for the latter would be:

Is there a website that shows different the Bitcoin exchange rates of different exchanges in one graph?

The distinction being, that the asker doesn't ask for one thing to be recommended over others, but rather wants to fulfill a specified need with whatever he can get.

Answer 1

These can be good, but they're also an enormous source of overhead. Have a look at the guidance that I laid out for Software Recommendations SE to get an idea of how they can turn out well.

These aren't, as you noted, technically 'recommendations' - It's more along the thinking of "There must be something that does this, but I have no idea what that would be called or where to look for it" and I do think that they fall squarely into the support genre that a Bitcoin community would expect from a resource such as ours.

That said, you have to moderate and edit these with an iron fist - they tend to attract a lot of low quality, mostly link answers and we've already got problems deciding what is or isn't spam / guerrilla marketing.

If the question is narrowly scoped and very specific when it comes to the endeavor of the author, then I suggest a case-by-case basis for now. We should be able to extrapolate what they're trying to accomplish, constraints that they must work within and provide (at most) 10 answers to the question.

Answers that consist of barely more than a link, are only tangentially related to the question, are written in the form of an advertisement or don't otherwise answer the question should be flagged as "Not An Answer" and deleted on site without ceremony.

I don't think we can flat out disallow this specific category because most common beginner questions are precisely this. A good collection of canonical and well maintained answers would be helpful, as long as we keep a close eye on it.

Answer 2

I was just reading a question on the network and saw the post notice that they apply for a similar type of restricted question on their site:

Regarding our "Recommendation to solve Problem"-type questions, we could make a guidance post on meta, create a specific tag, and make a post notice similar to the one shown here. –– Then ruthlessly delete posts that don't adhere to the required standard.

Would that improve the situation with such posts?