Sick of "unprofessional" questions

Question

I'm seeing SO MANY questions like this: How to get my server viewable from the internet?

From the FAQ:

Server Fault is for system administrators and IT professionals, people who manage or maintain computers in a professional capacity.

Frankly I'm wondering if we're not being hard enough on these sorts of questions. I would be very shocked to find out that anyone who works in IT professionally can't do a simple port forward, even if their expertise is in something else.

That particular question is just attracting poor answers, which will most likely attract more poor questions and more poor answers.

Should we be coming down harder on these questions? I'm not complaining that they're simple, or easy to google, or even a bad question - they're just questions that no competant IT person would ask, or if they did ask, they would know to provide more information about their situation.

Answer 1

My suspicion is that this is working as intended.

I feel that the entry-level questions are good practice for people new to the field to answer. If a question is relevant to SF, but completely uninteresting to me personally, I simply won't answer it - if NOBODY finds it interesting enough to answer, then the system has worked perfectly and the question will die a natural death.

I'm not sure it benefits anybody to vote to close questions simply because the asker doesn't know enough to post the correct terminology. Once upon a time, I'd never heard of an A record, either - but I'd been a professional in the field for a few years before I'd had cause to learn. Somtimes the career path is a winding one.

Also, their "uninteresting" nature makes them accessible to lower-rep members to rack up some points on questions that will be passed up by the rest of the community. I'd imagine that otherwise, there's bound to be a lot of frustration for someone trying to build up rep, when every question has a good answer already.

Answer 2

One way to look at the questions that are asked here is: how far away is the asker from even comprehending the answer?

Our favorite kinds of questions are the ones where the asker just needs a little bit of help getting over a tiny hill. "I need to do X. I tried Y and Z. Z almost worked, but I got X-purple. How do I get rid of the purple? I scoured the man page and found nothing."

It drives us crazy when questions show rather a lack of any kind of knowledge. "How can I get a server on the Internet? KTHXBYE!" In this case the asker has a huge MOUNTAIN of knowledge to get over before they can even BEGIN to solve their problem.

My advice?

1. Don't answer a question if you don't feel like it. Not every question deserves an answer. On the other hand, if you think someone else might be happy to answer it, there's no reason to close it.

2. When in doubt, an answer deserves about the same amount of effort as the question got. If someone writes a one sentence question about "how to get a server onto the Internet," they deserve about a sentence answer, either linking to a checklist somewhere, or just tell them to hire a damn sysadmin. On the other hand, if they put a lot of effort into asking a very specific question, they deserve more effort for the answer.

The other day I saw a question on Stack Overflow which was basically "Can I make a forum using Python." The question didn't show very much effort, but it was an honest question. So I answered it: "Yes. Python is a general purpose language, so it can be used for just about anything, including making forums." This actually satisfied the asker. There was no need to go into a dissertation about how to do this... I'm not going to give someone an undergraduate education in programming just because they typed a question onto the site!

Most importantly, look for common patterns and write canonical, permanent answers. If people keep asking how to get a server onto the internet, make a simple, clear checklist, and point people to that. The checklist doesn't have to have detailed instructions. It could be something like (a) get a domain (b) get a dns server (c) open the firewall (d) run appropriate services. If people keep asking what 128.0.0.1/24 means, create a general purpose question with the title "How do I interpret an IP address of the form A.B.C.D/E?", answer that question concisely, and close everything as a dupe.

But before you close things, keep in mind:

• Just because you're bored by a simple question, doesn't mean it doesn't belong here! Help prevent repetition by creating canonical question/answer pairs that can be used as duplicate targets, or leave the simple questions to the newbies. You don't have to answer everything.

• If you're bored by Server Fault, that's OK. Take a month off. Take a year off. Find something you can do where you're actually learning, not repeating yourself endlessly.

There are basically two ways discussion groups can go. They can stick with the same people (who are learning and getting smarter) or they can stick with the same subject. If they stick with the same people, the only way to keep them entertained is to get more and more esoteric until you have a site where nobody can get useful information except the 14 old-timers who have been around since the beginning. This is nice for the 14 old-timers, but doesn't make the Internet a better place. If you stick with the same subject, eventually the old-timers get bored. That's a better outcome, I think. I think the old-timers would be better served by finding a new area to learn about that's challenging and interesting.

Answer 3

Don't answer it and they won't come. Yes, we should enforce the scope of the site.

See also:

Perception of purpose

Answer 4

It's a tough one, for sure. Our traffic has certainly been increasing (quantcast), but the quality of the questions has gone down. Or perhaps more specifically, the interesting ones are still in there but there are a lot more 101-type questions. Witness all the mod_rewrite questions we're getting these days, and the "how do I serve on the Internet" questions we're getting.

Personally, I'm torn. There are two things that attract the professionals we want:

1. High quality questions with high quality answers in topics that are interesting.
2. Enough of #1 to make it look like a viable community.

I deeply fear that if we ensure #1, we won't pass #2.

Answer 5

• Dont be hard on newbies!
  We are doing the best we can to be helpful!

• Where were you ten years ago?
  At the very starting point of your professional career? Wouldnt you feel joy and informational happiness discovering such great community? Would you think then, oh wayt a minute, this great place boasting of great friendly helpful pros is nowhere for me to ask my questions?

• Sorry, did not knew this place is exclusively
  meant for experienced professionals, only!

• Boy i wished i was as knowledgeable as some pros,
  that way i could help them (or you) out with a creative solution, someday!

• But first, we need to wander around here way more,
  byproduct: some silly questions inbetween very insightful ones

• Dont feel sick of our questions:
  Instead, feel good you are sitting up there with a crown of experience, looking down to crazy starters who have barely figured out enthousiast level NAT routing / home FTP servers.

• We are the ones who should feel sick!
  Of the countless pro-questions and pro-answers we dont even understand, but feel are very useful to learn and to master!

Answer 6

Just to throw it out there .... where would newbies go if they are learning to become IT Pro's and have questions to their learning-process?

Is SF a proper landing place to ask Q/A, for them? Or, as the FAQ states, it's for peeps who manage and maintain .. implying that they are in the industry already, and not in uni, etc or learning to break into the industry.

Update:

Maybe a new type of tag could be added? newbie or beginner or something?

Answer 7

I don't know why I didn't see this question earlier but it reflects my view closely. In fact the swamping of what I view as inappropriate questions, using the FAQ as a guideline to decide what is appropriate, means I spend a LOT less time of SF compared to what I used to. I've dropped from over 400 consecutive days to sometimes only a visit or two in a week. When I do visit I often find myself spending more time voting to close such questions than reading or answering the rest.

Answer 8

I'm just going to throw this out there. But I'm so glad that other people mentioned this. I'm new and all but I see a ton of questions seem to belong on superuser or otherwise not useful to a sysadmin and it really bugs me. I suppose I should flag them for closure, I was wondering if it was just me.