Timeline for Questions to ask the SE staff regarding the future of ServerFault
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
39 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 26, 2015 at 20:05 | comment | added | JamesRyan | @user2284570 no offense but I don't think you are adding anything useful to this conversion | |
| Jul 26, 2015 at 19:12 | comment | added | user2284570 | @JamesRyan if questions are not good question on SU but too technical for the community, then they are barely unanswerable and should closed. If you would create a proposal for them, I think it would be closed as a duplicate of SU rather than SF. Same thing as here. You have already hundreds of websites/chat channels dedicated to system administration at a medium level outside Stack Exchange. SF is probably unique because it targets professional system administration in large environments (small business don't require to go in college). | |
| Jul 26, 2015 at 18:22 | comment | added | JamesRyan | @user2284570 usually they are closed/moved to SU as 'home' questions, then turn out to be too technical for that userbase and never answered on either site. | |
| Jul 25, 2015 at 20:43 | comment | added | user2284570 | @JamesRyan Just sum up : remembers such questions are perfectly Ok on Super User. The objective of stack exchange is not to have duplicate sites. If they behave well on SU, then why wanting them on SF | |
| Aug 14, 2013 at 9:52 | comment | added | JamesRyan | @Iain Which is important though, who asked the question or who the question helps? As a systems administrator a lot of the answers I come here for have been asked by someone, I don't care who asked as long as I find a relevant answer. But also I regularly find questions I need to find an answer to have been closed or migrated to SU for some daft reason because someone asked them slightly the wrong way which is really frustrating. | |
| Aug 14, 2013 at 8:06 | comment | added | Ward - Trying Codidact Mod | What does "Search and ratings are the best defense against junk..." mean? Should people who answer Qs search for good ones? (how?) What ratings are you referring to? | |
| Aug 13, 2013 at 17:05 | comment | added | platforms | People don't come here because they know stuff and have an excellent question. They come here because they don't know stuff and they have a problem. | |
| Aug 9, 2013 at 19:33 | comment | added | user9517 | @JamesRyan: There are almost no questions from people who would naturally call themselves IT administrators (professional or not). The vast majority of our questions come from people who would naturally call themselves developers. In that respect we have already failed because we don't attract IT administrators and most of the new ones that do drop in don't hang about because of the river of shitty questions from amateurs. | |
| Aug 9, 2013 at 13:37 | comment | added | Andrew B | Equating a 5 rep barrier to being a monthly subscription site is just a little...yeah. It's the same premise behind why comments aren't available until people have 10 rep, but in our particular case it needs to be frontloaded into asking questions as well. If we fail as a result of that system, then yeah, just tear the site down; the stated premise can't work. It's a little difficult to have a meaningful discussion going when I'm having to pick apart an atom of hyperbole in every reply, so this is my last comment. Kudos for keeping it civil at least. | |
| Aug 9, 2013 at 10:55 | comment | added | JamesRyan | It is not very forward thinking either. Most of us professionals were at one time enthusiastic amateurs in our home/garage/basement, etc. By making those people unwelcome now we are reducing the likelyhood of them joining later. The line needs to be drawn closer to not providing tech support. | |
| Aug 9, 2013 at 8:53 | comment | added | Sirex | I'm just saying, it isn't working because the premise is fundamentally flawed. "Enterprise standards" is largely meaningless. Not entirely, but enough to undermine the purpose of the site. All suggestions so far just involve raising the barrier of entry and lowering inclusiveness (which would nullify the key feature of se sites which made them attractive in the first place). But if you want to go down that route, you may as well just stick a monthly subscription cost on membership. | |
| Aug 9, 2013 at 3:41 | comment | added | Andrew B | "what the public actually wants" is a straw man; if the backend systems do not align with the intended purpose of the site (it currently facilitates the posting effortless questions on a site that wants to be "SU with enterprise standards"), of course everything is going to be dragged down to that level. Pointing out that this goal doesn't align with the basic SE model would have been dead on, and it's been touched on a few times already. But implying that this site should align with what the entropy of the internet wants? Give me a break. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 23:49 | comment | added | Sirex | sure, but as much as it pains people, that is why the site stats are so crappy. The word "professional" is totally meaningless; e.g: I used to work in an organisation with 10,000 people, now i work in an organisation with 50. The way they employ IT isn't remotely similar. Put simply, the site is misaligned with what the public actually want, as evidenced by the fact that its doing so badly. I do get the pipe-dream that the site wants to be, but it's just not realistic to dictate what "professional" means. To be blunt, the actual impression put outwards is that SF is just SU for snobs. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 22:24 | comment | added | Andrew B | @Sirex They may go on to get answers, but the assumed context of those answers is that a production environment was being worked with. The answers are therefore useful to professionals. This is perfectly acceptable. If you taint the context of your own question towards being in a home environment, the answers are not useful to professionals. End of story. This is why the moderators try to "save" questions if they can be fixed by removing the word home. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 21:53 | comment | added | Sirex | @JourneymanGeek if people (and i admit i do it too) are deliberately dropping off the fact some questions are in reality home-environment based and those questions go on to get decent answers, the real problem is that the SF website is making distinctions based on flawed logic. imho, closing questions based on some vague metric of "professionalism" is really dumb and SF will suffer while that practice continues. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 21:49 | comment | added | Rob Moir | A perfectly good question for SF can be closed just because it includes the word "Home", which is madness when the meat of the question can apply perfectly well to both environments. Actually I'd agree with this. Despite my hardline stance against "home" questions on SF I have in the past edited questions that I thought applied to this precisely to remove the 'home' bit out, so they'd survive here. Where I'd disagree is that quite often people think a question applies perfectly well to both environments when in fact it doesn't. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 17:50 | comment | added | TheCleaner | Personally, I think "Anything in a home or development environment" in the FAQ should be changed to "Anything NOT about managing computer systems in a professional capacity." With "managing" emphasized. That would allow encompassing someone taking care of their 5 person garage startup and admins with lab environment questinos while still closing questions about "I need to allow inbound port 666 on my home router, how?" | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 17:44 | comment | added | Chris S Mod | Your "heavy handed Moderators" often do edit out the word "home" if the question is a better fit for SF. Also, you claim to have seen man "vmware [questions] closed closed as off topic", have any links to backup that? A quick search and the first 15 questions I found were: Pricing; not related to VMware; trying to install <2GB RAM; crap; shopping; shopping; non-HCL hardware; crap; shopping; shopping; shopping; licensing; crap; crap; crap; crap; and not VMware related... Maybe there's something good in there, but it's not a pervasive problem. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 16:57 | comment | added | JamesRyan | This is easy enough for you and me, but newcomers don't know these ways to make it work for them and to be honest they should not have to. The whole reason to have human moderators and not just an automated filter is so that they can use a bit of common sense and discretion. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 16:41 | comment | added | Journeyman Geek | I run a small office. I just have the common sense to realise that some questions are better off asked here, and some there. If I happened to run a half dozen systems with AD at home, and had a wierd problem, I'd ask here, and leave out the fact that its at home. Likewise, I'd often ask work questions on SU since they were closer to home user questions. Can't be that hard to just leave out the relevant bits, would it? | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 16:22 | comment | added | user11604 | I'm somewhat with James on this, as I largely tend to agree. I suspect that the real problem with SF is that it is incorrectly targeted. A perfectly good question for SF can be closed just because it includes the word "Home", which is madness when the meat of the question can apply perfectly well to both environments. I often think an amalgamation of serverfault and superuser, might be better. I'm sure this is a minority view amongst the regulars here on SF (and possibly on SU), so it's offered on a FWIW basis. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 14:13 | comment | added | JamesRyan | and you wonder why people are put off serverfault when they face this attitude from so called community leaders | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 14:07 | comment | added | JamesRyan | @Chopper3 being pedantic about incidental details in order to ignore the point or to flag a question that would otherwise apply in a professional environment is neither precise or helpful. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 13:58 | comment | added | JamesRyan | @RobM indeed, too much pedantry does seem to be part of the problem | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 13:37 | comment | added | Chopper3 | One man's pedantry is another man's precision. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 13:28 | comment | added | Rob Moir | OK. You're clearly dead set on dismissing people who disagree with you as pedants. Your inability to make a clear point is not actually my problem. I'm done with this. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 12:42 | comment | added | JamesRyan | Also a lot of SMEs need to 'make do' with one thing or another to meet their limited budgets. We should be advising on where that is most appropriate not snootily turning our noses up and telling people to be more professional. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 12:40 | comment | added | JamesRyan | I am well aware what vmware is. Another example of pedantry rather than answering the real point. Aside from the fact that the specific questions I was thinking about were in fact about ESXi, workstation is marketed as a product for professionals to setup or manipulate virtual machines for their other professional platforms, maybe you were thinking of vmware player? None the less, the question itself, not the mere mention of the word home should determine whether it is on topic. How many 'vmware' experts are there frequenting SU do you think? | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 11:56 | comment | added | Rob Moir | I have seen many questions about pro technologies eg. vmware that were closed as off topic simply because they mentioned a home/dev setup. -- that's because the right answer for a home setup, where "making do" is acceptable isn't as useful in a pro deployment. Case in point: you mention questions about "VMWare". That's a company name, you might as well say "It's like the pros because they use the Microsoft". There's a big difference between ESXi in business and VMWare workstation at home & home use scenarios will get better answers from people on SU. Isn't that what it's about? | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 10:50 | comment | added | JamesRyan | I have seen many questions about pro technologies eg. vmware that were closed as off topic simply because they mentioned a home/dev setup. The answers would have been far more useful here than on SU because they apply to the technology regardless of the environment that it is being used in | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 10:48 | comment | added | JamesRyan | On hold effectively kills a question though so it only offers the chance for rewording, not to get some use out of the question as it stands. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 10:42 | comment | added | user9517 | In response to 2. questions are now put 'on hold' for 5 days before being closed properly. Dev/home use questions have a home on {so,su,u&l} too. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 10:40 | comment | added | Chopper3 | Yep, very much so - thanks for reading the question and answering it. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 10:39 | comment | added | user9517 | I suspect that you've missed some of the discussions going on here and in particular the comment here which spawned a conference call at which the above list was generated. The 'question' here is to get additional feedback/clarification prior to taking up the offer of a call with the SE team, so in that respect you answer doesn't really answer the question posed. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 10:39 | history | edited | JamesRyan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 8, 2013 at 10:33 | comment | added | JamesRyan | How ironic that you deem my answer as offtopic rather than think about the actual point of it. In the form of questions now, happy? | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 10:31 | history | edited | JamesRyan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 8, 2013 at 10:19 | comment | added | Chopper3 | Have you got any questions to be added/edited or any solutions? because that's the point of this question - there are others for discussion - this is just about achieving improvements in the short term. Sorry if you think THIS is rude but the question states the objectives. | |
| Aug 8, 2013 at 10:15 | history | answered | JamesRyan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |