Today we had this question: The Art of practicing electric contemporary guitar where OP was basically asking
So, I'm a classically trained guitar player who also plays contemporary guitar, mainly blues, jazz, rock and funk and I was wondering what are your thoughts and approaches to contemporary guitar and practice effectively.
[...]
What are your thoughts of practising contemporary guitar to achieve all of this
Too broad of a question, since they mentioned quite a few contemporary guitar genres, in addition to the fact that this would result in a list of an answer and there have been quite a few discussions on meta about these kind of questions, and they usually get closed.
A meta discussion on the topic had luser droog's insightful answer:
The perceived problem with asking for recommendations is that they easily fall into "big list" type of answers which are difficult to keep up-to-date, hard to vet for quality, and just generally fall apart and become pretty useless. There may be some site that still allow them, but IME as the site grows they get shut down.
Tim and I commented on the post saying pretty much the aforementioned fact:
Whereas this might be an interesting question, it is way too broad. I mean there is a very different approach in jazz guitar to rock guitar, from blues to funk etc. There are numerous books on each style – Shevliaskovic 3 hours ago
@Shevliaskovic I know that, Im just seeing what people have to offer in relation to this topic, It really confuses me why people can answer open ended questions on the forums here. – random10101010 2 hours ago
This is not a forum. Most accepted questions have answers that experienced posters write. For that to be facilitated, questions need to be focused and not open-ended. – Tim 1 hour ago
@Tim where does it specifically say that? – random10101010 1 hour ago
and OP, quite rightfully, asked where does it say that these kind of questions are off topic?
I wanted to refer him to the Help Center, but I couldn't find anything that explicitly said this. The closest thing would be in What types of questions should I avoid asking?, where there was:
If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here.
OP's question might fall under this, but I have to say the question is not phrased exactly like that.
So basically to sum up, I would like to propose we add an extra bullet point either in What types of questions should I avoid asking? or What topics can I ask about here? where it specifies the questions that result in (opinion based or not) list-kind of answers are off topic.