I posted a question about MD5 hash collision back in 2014. As far as I know questions about algorithms are on-topic on Stack Overflow, and the cryptography tag did not have the warning "CRYPTOGRAPHY MUST BE PROGRAMMING RELATED" back then. The question is not phrased the best, but it got reasonable answers, and no negative feedback.
I recently came across this old question, and it did not have an answer and so many years have passed, I decided to start a bounty on it, to get more up to date answers.
Someone reported it for being off-topic, but a mod declined it with a comment "I see no reason why this is off-topic. Not a programming question? You must surely be joking!", so it seems that this is controversial for the mods as well.
They opened a question here on meta, and suddenly my question got 25 downvotes, and eventually got closed for being off-topic. I do understand why some of you decided to close it, but in my opinion it could have been more constructive to move this question to cryptography stack exchange, instead of downvoting and closing it.
Stack Overflow is full of old "not directly programming related" cryptography questions, that are highly upvoted. Those have to be closed/locked as well? Just to name a few:
- Is it possible to decrypt MD5 hashes?
- Is calculating an MD5 hash less CPU intensive than SHA family functions?
- What's the shortest pair of strings that causes an MD5 collision?
- Maximum length for MD5 input/output
What is the recommended policy in this case? How is it possible to request to move the question to cryptography stack exchange? Should I update the question to be more programming related, by asking about how to generate such strings?