<p><strong>TL;DR:</strong> Recently, it seems to me like we have been a little trigger-happy about closing questions as &quot;only about software/programming&quot;. I ask that we please ease off a bit.</p>
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<p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic">Our help page on on-topic-ness</a> says (emphasis in the original):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>if it [the question] needs <em>statistical expertise</em> to understand or answer, ask it here</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The closure notice I am concerned about here says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER ... OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now, of course there is a continuum and room for reasonable disagreement as to where &quot;needs statistical expertise&quot; ends and &quot;programming, debugging, or performing routine operations&quot; begins. I will happily VTC questions on R that ask about how to use the <code>*apply()</code> functions, or how to create a particular plot in <code>ggplot</code>. My personal litmus test usually is whether J. Random R Programmer would be expected to be able to answer, potentially on StackOverflow. (I am not concerned with &quot;unclear&quot; questions here.) As in: are help pages and R tutorials enough to answer, or do we actually need to know some statistics?</p>
<p>However, here are just two recent examples of questions that were (almost) closed, although I would definitely argue that the &quot;needs statistical expertise&quot; criterion is met - even if this expertise need not be very deep:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/490599/1352">Why are my fitted values returning greater than 1 in GLM?</a> OP ran a logistic regression with <code>glm()</code> without specifying <code>family=binomial</code>. You need to understand the difference between OLS and logistic regression to answer here. No, this is not statistical rocket science, but it's something a run-of-the-mill programmer does not know.</p>
</li>
<li><p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/490746/1352">Can I use bottom up, middle out, or top down approaches with fabletools:reconcile?</a> OP struggles with what I would consider a beta release (the 3rd edition of an online textbook, which is missing a key chapter that can be found in the 2nd edition, and a <em>very</em> rudimentarily documented R function). To answer, you need to have an understanding of hierarchical forecast reconciliation. I referenced <em>JASA</em>, the <em>International Journal of Forecasting</em> and <em>Computational Statistics &amp; Data Analysis</em> in my answer, and necessarily so.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Sometimes it feels to me like some of us see a question that asks about R, perhaps even in the title... and jump to conclusions.</p>
<p>I ask that we please be just a <em>tiny</em> little bit more relaxed about leaving questions open where there might be some statistical aspect, even if it is in the context of software.</p>
<p>Alternatively, we could be more stringent than I would prefer. Fair enough. But then we should communicate this explicitly in our on-topic help page, and hopefully have a discussion here beforehand.</p>
<p>And of course <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;q=%5bon-topic%5d%20software%20is%3aq">we have discussed similar topics before</a>, which in fact informed our current closure notice as cited above, and also our on-topic page (?).</p>
