Occasionally, a member of the ServerFault community will ask a question that -- although it comes up in the process of carrying out sysadmin duties -- is a question that may also be on topic elsewhere.
It appears that there are two schools of thought here:
School #1: If a question is relevant to systems/network administration, it is on topic, even if it is also a generic question about a particular platform or technology.
School #2: If a question is relevant to systems/network administration, but it is also relevant to computing in general, it should be closed, migrated to SuperUser, and/or migrated to a platform-specific StackExchange site.
In practice, the ServerFault community seems to favor school #2. Questions that are relevant to systems/network administration, but are also relevant to personal computing, tend to get closed or migrated.
Example of a question that Kyle Brandt brought up in chat:
Here's an example of two questions that I personally posted with answers with the intention of adding long-tail content to the site, but I was pressured into closing or migrating both because the same situations theoretically could have been encountered by a non-sysadmin user:
- Unzip returns "unsupported compression method 14"
- Batch unzip .zip files using 7zBatch unzip .zip files using 7z
Is the current dominance of School #2 intentional? Should the community be closing/migrating all questions that, although relevant to network/systems administration, might be "more relevant" on another StackExchange site?