There was a recent question that asked:
What [are] the key differences between MSP Server 2007 & MSP Server 2010?
The title of the question made the scope too large, and possibly something that one could Google for or read Microsoft's marketing materials to determine. Further, the body of the question would likely have generated links or lists as answers by asking:
I want to demo Project Server 2010 and I'm seeking a good checklist of new features and tools that have been added to Microsoft Project Server 2010?
However, when one looks at the FAQ, it's not immediately clear why the question is off-topic. In fact, when voting to close, I felt intuitively that it was, but couldn't quite figure out how to categorize it.
- It might be Not Constructive because it's listy, but wasn't really a polling question per se.
- The way we apply Not a Real Question fits, perhaps because the question was "overly broad," but I'm not sure it would have been on-topic even if more narrowly scoped.
- It also seemed Off-Topic because it seemed to be more about feature comparison than about how to use a given tool to solve a problem, but it wasn't asking for tool recommendations. As a result, I fell back on the recurring discussions on meta about how we should apply tools, despite the fact that the FAQ doesn't really address this issue directly.
In short, it seemed like a reasonable question that was just a bad fit for this site, but there wasn't really anything in the FAQ that I could point to and say, unambiguously, "This is why the question is off-topic."
The author had asked an interesting question, and (in my opinion) one that was deserving of a better close reason than I was able to provide in my comments. However, I'm honestly stumped about how the FAQ could address this sort of question more directly, making its topicality less ambiguous.
With that in mind, is there any way the FAQ could be improved to make it more clear why this sort of question is off-topic?