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Recently, there have been some bookmarklet questions on Web Apps (both of the most recent posts were pertaining to employing bookmarklets on Stack Exchange sites, but let's hold that aside for a moment). I am taking the opportunity to post this because scope has been a pressing issue for a while, and I think this particular topic merits discussion. I'm certainly not calling out these particular questions or their author(s).

According to the Help Center:

Web Applications Stack Exchange is for expert and advanced users of web applications.

If your question generally covers …

  • Using Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Google, or any other website which behaves like an application
  • Bookmarklets
  • Features of browsers which are directly related to the use of a web application (Greasemonkey scripts for a web application, etc.)

so bookmarklets are, by this definition, still very much on-topic.

At one point, we were very much the "all things web related" site on the Exchange, but gradually the site's scope has become more grounded in using web applications (Google Sheets, Facebook, etc.), and so the scripting and the cloud management tools have all but fallen by the wayside.

Is WA.SE still the best location for these questions? Is there any SE site on which they could be better served (particularly in terms of theme and expertise)? If so, do we want to change the on-topic section of the site to reflect this?

Since these particular bookmarklets were pertaining to SE, my thought would be that StackApps would be the most appropriate place for them, and I think there was already some chatting about that, so I didn't press the issue with the author(s).

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    bookmarklet has 22 questions, the All time answerer has one answer and score of 6. The all time asker has one question and score of 17. There is only one user with two answers. All the "top" askers has only one post. It looks that there isn't too much commitment with bookmarklets :(
    – Rubén Mod
    Aug 15, 2018 at 1:46
  • On Stack Overflow the tag bookmarklet has 1100 questions.
    – Rubén Mod
    Aug 15, 2018 at 4:31
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    For what it's worth, there are now only 19 questions, and only 6 aren't closed.
    – ale
    Aug 16, 2018 at 14:39
  • And now, only 16 questions, 12 of which are closed.
    – ale
    Aug 18, 2018 at 19:18

1 Answer 1

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I guess that depends on what sort of questions we even get about bookmarklets.

  • Getting help in writing them would be off-topic. (Try Stack Overflow)
  • Getting help finding one that does something one wants is a recommendation question, so equally verboten

Looking over the existing questions, it seems an awful lot of them fall into those two buckets. (Close votes incoming.) Over a quarter of them are already closed.

Prior to July (and that question's not doing well), the latest question we have for bookmarklets is from 2014.

In my opinion, no, bookmarklets are no longer on-topic here.

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    This was my sense as well. I will wait and see if there are opposing viewpoints before I change the Help Center text, though.
    – jonsca
    Aug 15, 2018 at 23:35
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    I went ahead and changed the Help Center text because there does not seem to be any opposition.
    – jonsca
    Aug 19, 2018 at 0:14
  • @jonsca: The tour doesn't seem to have been changed.
    – ale
    Aug 21, 2018 at 1:22

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