I'm in two minds about this. While I realize Stack Exchange say these types of questions don't work, and from the start people have been clear they don't want to see bug reports or feature requests here, I've still yet to see what the actual problem is.

Obviously it has been stated by Robert et al that these questions don't work on Stack Overflow (per referenced MSO threads), but this forum is different to Stack Overflow, and I don't believe SE have any other forums even similar to EE Answers (other than Wordpress and Drupal, but those don't have anywhere near the percentage community support as EE Answers).

Let's take a look at a couple of recent questions:

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**A bug report:** http://expressionengine.stackexchange.com/questions/5080/assets-2-0-2-fatal-error

TL;DR: A PHP error displaying on pages after upgrading to latest version. Answer: Fixed in next release (with version number). This benefits the community, because anyone googling that error, or searching SE will find the solution. Great!

In other situations like this, I have seen developers post a comment asking for the OP to follow up via email, then the solution has been posted as an answer. As long as the questions are being followed up and answered (following the Q&A format), that seems fine to me.

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**A feature request:** http://expressionengine.stackexchange.com/questions/5089/expassetsfiles-limit-parameter-not-limiting-the-returned-files

TL;DR: Trying to use tags in a certain way, not working. Answer: Not possible yet, will be supported in 2.1 release. This also benefits the community - it can be found via searches, and also referenced if the same question happens to be asked again. Again, it also follows the Q&A model perfectly. Great!

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I'd like someone to point out what is so particularly "on the slippery slope to the site failing" about these questions. As you say, we've been getting more of them lately, and yet our site statics keep going up and up (and compared to other SE betas we are extremely successful). The main argument I've heard so far is that people don't like seeing them on the front page / recent questions list. However, I think that is a little short sighted - you're never going to be able to grok every question on the front page. Just look at the [Stack Overflow front page](http://stackoverflow.com/) - most of the questions there I don't have a clue about, and yet the site is wildly successful. You can set favorite and ignored tags if you don't care about certain questions.

The other main argument against these questions seems to be that Jeff Atwood says it's not allowed on Stack Overflow - but as I pointed out earlier, this site is completely different from Stack Overflow (otherwise we wouldn't need it in the first place), so it should have different goals, and therefore different rules.

At the end of the day, I want this site to succeed, and this is a community decision. I think providing official add-on support here is fantastic, and will lead to a hugely successful, popular site and a great resource for the EE community. So before we start pushing add-on developers and users away by abruptly closing questions, I'd like to see some strong evidence/arguments for why people are against this.