Are problems that turned out to be typos “Not a Real Question”?

Question

I happened to see the three questions below in short succession, and they all struck me as being "non-questions" because the problems described were either due to a typo or a misinterpretation of what was happening.

It seems to me that even though they have an accepted answer, they're candidates for closing and deleting, but I'm not quite sure why I think that. As I said, they seem NARQ-ish, or maybe it's because a typo is clearly a local error (Layer 8 or ID-Ten-T Error/PEBKAC), I'm not quite sure.

What should be done about this type of question?

How to solve authentication error in sendmail relay through gmail

Squid and AD authentication

haproxy domain routing

Answer 1

Of the three questions linked to I might tend slightly towards NARQ for the first one but there's no reason to close the other three.

Who amongst us hasn't had an issue that resulted from a typo, missing a step or something equally basic? That's PEBKAC and we all do it. For most it's no big deal because a colleague can look at the problem and often quickly spot the error. For those of us who work alone or don't have a competent colleague SF is that second pair of eyes.

Seriously, if we didn't make mistakes or failed to understand something there would be precious little to ask questions about because just about everything else is RTFM.

Answer 2

• How to solve authentication error in sendmail relay through gmail

It may be NARQ, but this may actually be useful to people in the future. "Hmm… this person's problem was solved by double-checking his credentials… maybe I should double-check mine."

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• haproxy domain routing

This one wasn't a typo

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• Squid and AD authentication

Yeah… PEBCAK.

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• setting static ipv6 address in ubuntu (OK, I'm biased as it was my answer)

The key here is that it's a "whoops, I made a typo in one of the option names and the system didn't tell me about it." It's not just a mistyped username/password/whatever.

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Even if the problem is PEBKAC, we should apply the test of "is a future sysadmin likely to come across this and find it useful?"