There has been a shift in tone in ServerFault over the last few years. When it started, the focus seemed to be on providing an open resource for professional admins to help figure out problems. Now it's evolved into a place where people can only ask specific questions with exacting detail.

The impetus for that change seems to have been based in the fact that there were a large number of bad questions being asked that really didn't have any answers, because of the vast open scope of the problem, usually because it was a specific problem with an astounding lack of detail. So it was codified that questions should be well-defined.

But not all questions are so easy to nail down. Some problems that professional admins encounter are matters of preference, but sometimes we need help in making sure that we're seeing all of the points to be weighed. Just because a question is open-ended doesn't mean that it's inherently a bad question.

It seems to me that the whole point of StackExchange sites is to allow the community to decide whether a question is good or not. There is still a need for moderators to deal with spam, egregiously bad questions, and other administrative minutiae. But it also seems that some people with greater privileges believe that if a question doesn't match their ideal for a question, then it shouldn't be asked. And some of those ideals have been codified in the FAQ. And I think that that's wrong. I'm not looking to save my question (for one thing, I don't really think it's in danger of being closed), but it has prompted me to be more open about my concern for the community.

In my opinion, this exclusive focus on specific questions threatens to turn the site into (a less annoying) Experts Exchange. And I'm not saying that to be spiteful. (On a related note, I think there's not nearly enough focus on "Too Localized".)

Some concrete possibilities, as described in the SE blog post Good Subjective, Bad Subjective (and pointed out by voretaq7 in comments) are to have a separate SE for more subjective questions or have a specific set of guidelines for subjective questions. (The ones in that blog post seem to make sense fairly universally.)

However, I think we just need to refocus on topics that are useful discussions for the professional sysadmin community, and allow the community more leeway to moderate itself via voting.

There has been a shift in tone in ServerFault over the last few years. When it started, the focus seemed to be on providing an open resource for professional admins to help figure out problems. Now it's evolved into a place where people can only ask specific questions with exacting detail.

The impetus for that change seems to have been based in the fact that there were a large number of bad questions being asked that really didn't have any answers, because of the vast open scope of the problem, usually because it was a specific problem with an astounding lack of detail. So it was codified that questions should be well-defined.

But not all questions are so easy to nail down. Some problems that professional admins encounter are matters of preference, but sometimes we need help in making sure that we're seeing all of the points to be weighed. Just because a question is open-ended doesn't mean that it's inherently a bad question.

It seems to me that the whole point of StackExchange sites is to allow the community to decide whether a question is good or not. There is still a need for moderators to deal with spam, egregiously bad questions, and other administrative minutiae. But it also seems that some people with greater privileges believe that if a question doesn't match their ideal for a question, then it shouldn't be asked. And some of those ideals have been codified in the FAQ. And I think that that's wrong. I'm not looking to save my question (for one thing, I don't really think it's in danger of being closed), but it has prompted me to be more open about my concern for the community.

In my opinion, this exclusive focus on specific questions threatens to turn the site into (a less annoying) Experts Exchange. And I'm not saying that to be spiteful. (On a related note, I think there's not nearly enough focus on "Too Localized".)

Some concrete possibilities, as described in the SE blog post Good Subjective, Bad Subjective (and pointed out by voretaq7 in comments) are to have a separate SE for more subjective questions or have a specific set of guidelines for subjective questions. (The ones in that blog post seem to make sense fairly universally.)

However, I think we just need to refocus on topics that are useful discussions for the professional sysadmin community, and allow the community more leeway to moderate itself via voting.

There has been a shift in tone in ServerFault over the last few years. When it started, the focus seemed to be on providing an open resource for professional admins to help figure out problems. Now it's evolved into a place where people can only ask specific questions with exacting detail.

The impetus for that change seems to have been based in the fact that there were a large number of bad questions being asked that really didn't have any answers, because of the vast open scope of the problem, usually because it was a specific problem with an astounding lack of detail. So it was codified that questions should be well-defined.

But not all questions are so easy to nail down. Some problems that professional admins encounter are matters of preference, but sometimes we need help in making sure that we're seeing all of the points to be weighed. Just because a question is open-ended doesn't mean that it's inherently a bad question.

It seems to me that the whole point of StackExchange sites is to allow the community to decide whether a question is good or not. There is still a need for moderators to deal with spam, egregiously bad questions, and other administrative minutiae. But it also seems that some people with greater privileges believe that if a question doesn't match their ideal for a question, then it shouldn't be asked. And some of those ideals have been codified in the FAQ. And I think that that's wrong. I'm not looking to save my question (for one thing, I don't really think it's in danger of being closed), but it has prompted me to be more open about my concern for the community.

In my opinion, this exclusive focus on specific questions threatens to turn the site into (a less annoying) Experts Exchange. And I'm not saying that to be spiteful. (On a related note, I think there's not nearly enough focus on "Too Localized".)

I think we need to refocus on topics that are useful discussions for the professional sysadmin community, and allow the community more leeway to moderate itself via voting.

There has been a shift in tone in ServerFault over the last few years. When it started, the focus seemed to be on providing an open resource for professional admins to help figure out problems. Now it's evolved into a place where people can only ask specific questions with exacting detail.

The impetus for that change seems to have been based in the fact that there were a large number of bad questions being asked that really didn't have any answers, because of the vast open scope of the problem, usually because it was a specific problem with an astounding lack of detail. So it was codified that questions should be well-defined.

But not all questions are so easy to nail down. Some problems that professional admins encounter are matters of preference, but sometimes we need help in making sure that we're seeing all of the points to be weighed. Just because a question is open-ended doesn't mean that it's inherently a bad question.

It seems to me that the whole point of StackExchange sites is to allow the community to decide whether a question is good or not. There is still a need for moderators to deal with spam, egregiously bad questions, and other administrative minutiae. But it also seems that some people with greater privileges believe that if a question doesn't match their ideal for a question, then it shouldn't be asked. And some of those ideals have been codified in the FAQ. And I think that that's wrong. I'm not looking to save my question (for one thing, I don't really think it's in danger of being closed), but it has prompted me to be more open about my concern for the community.

In my opinion, this exclusive focus on specific questions threatens to turn the site into (a less annoying) Experts Exchange. And I'm not saying that to be spiteful. (On a related note, I think there's not nearly enough focus on "Too Localized".)

Some concrete possibilities, as described in the SE blog post Good Subjective, Bad Subjective (and pointed out by voretaq7 in comments) are to have a separate SE for more subjective questions or have a specific set of guidelines for subjective questions. (The ones in that blog post seem to make sense fairly universally.)

However, I think we just need to refocus on topics that are useful discussions for the professional sysadmin community, and allow the community more leeway to moderate itself via voting.