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I am a long-time but low-intensity SO user who occasionally asks and answers questions. I just asked a question, my first in a while. As the title of this meta question indicates, I requested help implementing a specific randomization algorithm in R. I didn't think this fit under "Troubleshooting/Debugging," "Best Practices," or "Tooling Recommendation," so I put it under "General Advice/Other." It seems like this question type is treated differently than others, as it doesn't have the option to accept answers, and instead of answers with comments, it just has "Replies." I found this very confusing.

I saw this Meta question complaining about question types being confusing. I agree question types are confusing, but if this feature must exist, I strongly recommend including some kind of question type that would be the obvious choice for someone who is asking for help implementing a specific algorithm in a specific programming language, not troubleshooting or debugging, or asking for advice or vague recommendations on best practices or "tooling."

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    The changes were announced three months ago, and this deficiency was noted before they ever went live. I'd love to see more accurate question types listed, but I'm not hopeful. In the mean time, just pretend that "Troubleshooting/Debugging" actually says "Stack Overflow". Commented Jan 29 at 21:18
  • Yes, I think I'm late to the party, I only just a few minutes ago saw the massively downvoted announcement of the experiment. Kind of quixotic for us to give any feedback it seems like ... Commented Jan 29 at 21:27
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    You are correct in your observation that the question categories are complete nonsense. This is due to a lack of common sense by those who implemented this. And in particular a lack of understanding of how the site SO works. I pointed out a lot of the specifics here but as usual to deaf ears. TL;DR: this was all done very incompetently and then I haven't even mentioned the awful UI. This must be deleted from the site. Commented Jan 30 at 7:57
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    In light of cafce's comment on my now-deleted answer, I recommend you just go to your profile and then settings from there and opt out of experiments. That will allow you to avoid this problem altogether because you will just see the normal (read: "old") ask question page where there is no option to choose what 'type' of question you want to ask (which is how it should always work, frankly) Commented Jan 30 at 19:15
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    Added the redesign-2026 because this feature request also applies to the "redesign" and doesn't yet have any status tag. Commented Mar 6 at 17:38

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Where the company went wrong with this, in my eyes, is that they are trying to introduce "new Stack Overflow" of which these new question types are definitely a staple. But they still need to drag old Stack Overflow along for the time being. And they did so very poorly.

One of two things or both of these things should have happened:

  1. Have a proper option which implies you are going to post a regular old-fashioned QA post with all the trimmings. But instead, we got "troubleshooting/debugging". What were they thinking? I'd have settled for "None of the above" even! Pretty much anything is less bad than what they came up with.

  2. Give you a new question type for implementation woes, whatever you want to call it. That's what you want to ask a question about, essentially. That question type will pretty much completely replace old Stack Overflow Q&A though, so I can understand they were hesitant to add one at this point in time if that was ever the plan. But yeah... see 1).

It was bungled pretty hard, that's for sure. The only thing you can do about it for now is be informed.

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    It was designed by people who do not use StackOverflow, and do not listen to feedback (despite how much they ask for it). One of the staff even replied somewhere "I thought 'How to' questions were off-topic." Commented Feb 6 at 12:17
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"Troubleshooting/Debugging" is a horrible question type label. It is inappropriate for questions about implementing an algorithm in a specific language and also fails to tell users that questions using the type referred to with it will get the "classic" experience instead of the new experience, which is an "alpha" .

I have seen many questions that use one of the other question type labels, which should be "Troubleshooting/Debugging", not because they match the label, but because they should be better handled with the "classic" experience. Unfortunately, the question type can't be changed, so the post should be deleted and reposted.

Reports of mislabeled questions
Below are a couple of reports of misslabeled questions posted as answers to What opinion-based questions and answers have you come across from this alpha experiment that you liked or didn't like?

Report Question
answer Flutter digital odometer ocr
answer How to not write a Firestore Converter for each type. (Firestore + Unity / C#)

References

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    If we're splitting hairs it's not the type that's terrible, it's the label. Commented Mar 6 at 17:56
  • "fails to tell users that questions using the type referred to with it will get the "classic" experience"—I agree, but suspect that may have been partly on purpose, to "see" how many people would "choose" the new experience. Commented Mar 6 at 23:53
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Always use the "troubleshooting/debugging" question type.

The other question types have major outstanding bugs that have been well-documented here on meta. "No comments" and "no community moderation options" are in my mind the two most glaring. These were raised fairly quickly on the original announcement post and in the past four months the only fix has been...threaded replies.

Even if it seems like you're more "asking for advice" than "solving a problem", pick the "troubleshooting" question type, and make sure to follow the Q&A advice in the help center. This will get you the standard Stack Overflow UI and the full set of site features.

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The question is, at its core, a "write my code for me" question. Historically, those questions are flat out off-topic. I don't know what the rules would be under whatever the company is trying to do now, but it wouldn't be a good question if you didn't already know the answer.

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