Timeline for Should we modify the FAQ to include policy subversion as explicitly Off Topic?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 4, 2012 at 22:50 | comment | added | voretaq7 | For the record: I think the SSH question should probably have been allowed to stay. It is not however an exemplar of the larger class of "policy circumvention" questions. It's a special-case exception (and I have no problem with those, but it doesn't change my feeling on the general rule). | |
| Jan 4, 2012 at 22:49 | comment | added | voretaq7 | @Gilles Real life example: Company circumvents policy because it causes a "now" problem, auditors come in, discover circumvention, and bust the company in the next audit cycle, leaving them with a much larger problem and a bunch of people who need to be disciplined/fired because of what happened. If you can be fired for doing it odds are you shouldn't be doing it (or you should change the policy), and that should be the answer any professional gives you. Feel free to disagree, but you aren't going to change my mind. | |
| Jan 4, 2012 at 22:02 | comment | added | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' | @voretaq7 Real life example: a team is spread over several towns, and central IT takes 3 months to open a port. When the answer to these “clarifying” questions is irrelevant to answering the original question, the original question should be answered as is. | |
| Jan 4, 2012 at 21:58 | comment | added | voretaq7 | @Gilles - What Holocryptic said. The key difference IMHO is an allowable question immediately reduces to a business reason ("We need WSUS to keep the Windows machines up to date"), where a bad question doesn't (Why do you need Facebook? Why do you need to SSH into things that aren't company systems? -- The question may be OK based on the answer to those clarifying questions). | |
| Jan 4, 2012 at 21:48 | comment | added | Holocryptic | @Gilles I disagree. They both need to be closed. The first is a policy question, and the second is a crap question anywhere. | |
| Jan 4, 2012 at 21:37 | comment | added | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' | Your ssh example is a legitimate question (just edit “my employer only allows” to “there is a firewall setting that I can't change”). The second question is not an administrator question but a user question, it belongs on Super User. | |
| Jan 4, 2012 at 19:30 | comment | added | voretaq7 | @ChrisS that's why it's just my $3.50 -- When I'm acting in a professional capacity (and as informal as I am on SF I consider it to be an extension of my professional sphere) that's a line I won't cross: I don't want people trying to circumvent the controls in my environment, so I won't help them do it in someone else's. | |
| Jan 4, 2012 at 19:30 | comment | added | Holocryptic | I agree that they should be closed, but there seemed to be enough ambiguity that I had to bring this up. If I had to bring it up here, and yet we agree that they should be closed, then a simple one-liner in the FAQ saying "No subversion" is warranted, I think. | |
| Jan 4, 2012 at 19:07 | comment | added | Chris S | I think there's quite a few people who would disagree that Professionals must abstain from aiding and abetting policy circumvention. | |
| Jan 4, 2012 at 18:59 | history | answered | voretaq7 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |