How to handle I-need-ideas questions?

Question

Have a look at the discussion in the last few comments of this question: How to weight pedals? (Not picking on this question, just using it to illustrate a situation.)

In the case of a question that's more along the lines of I-need-ideas-to-do-foo (as opposed to how-to-do-foo, which is a different question), is StackEchange an appropriate way to go about this? I have in mind a case where a user needs ideas to try as opposed to the answer.

Is this what the community wiki function is for? Or is this a question we should kick over to regular forums? (I'd rather not do that, but it might serve the person asking the question better.)

Answer 1

But there is one best answer: the solution the questioner actually goes with.

To me it seems like a standard StackExchange question: when you ask a programming question on StackOverflow or a sysadmin question on ServerFault, it's likely that there are several ways to do what you want, but odds are good that one answer is better than the others, and there's at most one solution that the questioner actually uses ("accepts").

In my opinion, the phrasing of "I need ideas to do foo" vs "how to do foo" is immaterial: regardless of that phrasing, there's likely to be multiple valid answers and ultimately there's one thing they'll do that works for them well enough that they stick with it.