We have a meta thread (Resources for learning English) that lists a number of resources of learning English.
However, requests for resources are off-topic on ELL main. In the last couple of days, a couple of questions have popped up in meta, asking about resources.
- Michael Swan, Practical English Usage - online? (deleted)
- https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1273/news-aggregation-websites-using-simplified-english
There are three votes to close the latter, and the OP closed the former after calling my assessment of it as off-topic "unsporting".
The OP of the former question also seemed to be under the impression that meta is for questions about references used for (on?) ELL. (This is possibly a result of the aforementioned reference list, which may give the impression that such posts are on-topic here.) If this is the case, then I apologise and will promptly vote to reopen the question, since otherwise duplicates may appear.
I'd like to find out how we should be responding to these questions. My understanding of the Meta site is that questions on it should relate to ELL.se, or the SE software; we have a close reason that actually says this.
Should we be closing these questions, or answering them (siphoning off-topic questions from main to meta)? Or another option? My main concern is that I may have caused offense, or voted to close incorrectly.