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Please indulge my bit of amateur anthropology here...

I think the other answers here have done a great job distinguishing between closing a question due to a "lack of professionalism" versus "not being about professional system administration"; however seeing as you are coming here from StackOverflow I want to bring up another piece of the cultural history of ServerFault.

The ServerFault community and the greater StackOverflow/StackExchange community are not in consensuses about the scope of this site. StackExchange is explicitly billing its mission as to be "free and open to everyone" whereas if you read ServerFault's purported scope it is explictly limited to "system and network administrators needing expert answers related to managing computer systems in a professional capacity." in seeming contraposition to StackExchange's stated goal of being free and open to everyone. The ServerFault community has traditionally advocated for an exclusionary scope.

The next few lines in StackExchange's mission statement say this, "Of course, all this information is worthless if you can't find the answer you need. So we empower our communities to curate it". Therein lies the internal tension - StackExchange wants to be open to everyone but it also wants to allow the sub-communities to curate content as they see fit to some extent. Not to be grandiose but the same tension exists in many Western democracies - the juxtaposition between liberty (doing as one wishes) versus equality (treating, both legally and civically different people equally).

Back when people voted and there more than 25 people with over 1000 rep actually engaged ServerFault used to have a much more larger scope (at least in practice), questions in that large grey area between "free and open" and "curated content", things like CPanel, VirtualBox and development environment questions were more tolerated albeit with some grumbling. I seem to remember the first big push-back was the FAQ Rewrite but I think culturally it had been gaining momentum for some time.

As ServerFault's popularity grew the influx of questions in the grey area increased exponentially faster than the influx of questions and more importantly contributors in our target audience. Consequently this had a few effects: 1) it lowered the overall quality of the site as there were less "qualified" people to answer more questions, 2) it disenfranchised the parts of the community advocating for a narrow scope and consequently they participated less or left the site altogether, and 3) it disenfranchised all the people expecting a "free and open" model when they showed up, got fishslapped with a VTC and then they summarily declared that we are all a bunch of dicks.

This situation sucks. Folks like Pedro Sousa and Michael J Mulligan are stuck in the middle of what I believe is really a culture war between the small (and rapidly shrinking) ServerFault community and the rest of the StackExchange network. Or framed less adversially, between those advocating a "curate the content" model versus a "free and open" model. The StackOverflow/StackExchange culture is much, much larger than the remaining ServerFault community and consequently they are "winning" by sheer numbers. And as the ServerFault community loses ground on the site they feel they have helped create they respond with increasing frustration, quickness to VTC and general brutality against the trespassers who have happened to have stepped into a four year long debate they didn't even know was there.

In short. Don't take it personally.

Please indulge my bit of amateur anthropology here...

I think the other answers here have done a great job distinguishing between closing a question due to a "lack of professionalism" versus "not being about professional system administration"; however seeing as you are coming here from StackOverflow I want to bring up another piece of the cultural history of ServerFault.

The ServerFault community and the greater StackOverflow/StackExchange community are not in consensuses about the scope of this site. StackExchange is explicitly billing its mission as to be "free and open to everyone" whereas if you read ServerFault's purported scope it is explictly limited to "system and network administrators needing expert answers related to managing computer systems in a professional capacity." in seeming contraposition to StackExchange's stated goal of being free and open to everyone. The ServerFault community has traditionally advocated for an exclusionary scope.

The next few lines in StackExchange's mission statement say this, "Of course, all this information is worthless if you can't find the answer you need. So we empower our communities to curate it". Therein lies the internal tension - StackExchange wants to be open to everyone but it also wants to allow the sub-communities to curate content as they see fit to some extent. Not to be grandiose but the same tension exists in many Western democracies - the juxtaposition between liberty (doing as one wishes) versus equality (treating, both legally and civically different people equally).

Back when people voted and there more than 25 people with over 1000 rep actually engaged ServerFault used to have a much more larger scope (at least in practice), questions in that large grey area between "free and open" and "curated content", things like CPanel, VirtualBox and development environment questions were more tolerated albeit with some grumbling. I seem to remember the first big push-back was the FAQ Rewrite but I think culturally it had been gaining momentum for some time.

As ServerFault's popularity grew the influx of questions in the grey area increased exponentially faster than the influx of questions and more importantly contributors in our target audience. Consequently this had a few effects: 1) it lowered the overall quality of the site as there were less "qualified" people to answer more questions, 2) it disenfranchised the parts of the community advocating for a narrow scope and consequently they participated less or left the site altogether, and 3) it disenfranchised all the people expecting a "free and open" model when they showed up, got fishslapped with a VTC and then they summarily declared that we are all a bunch of dicks.

This situation sucks. Folks like Pedro Sousa and Michael J Mulligan are stuck in the middle of what I believe is really a culture war between the small (and rapidly shrinking) ServerFault community and the rest of the StackExchange network. Or framed less adversially, between those advocating a "curate the content" model versus a "free and open" model. The StackOverflow/StackExchange culture is much, much larger than the remaining ServerFault community and consequently they are "winning" by sheer numbers. And as the ServerFault community loses ground on the site they feel they have helped create they respond with increasing frustration, quickness to VTC and general brutality against the trespassers who have happened to have stepped into a four year long debate they didn't even know was there.

In short. Don't take it personally.

Please indulge my bit of amateur anthropology here...

I think the other answers here have done a great job distinguishing between closing a question due to a "lack of professionalism" versus "not being about professional system administration"; however seeing as you are coming here from StackOverflow I want to bring up another piece of the cultural history of ServerFault.

The ServerFault community and the greater StackOverflow/StackExchange community are not in consensuses about the scope of this site. StackExchange is explicitly billing its mission as to be "free and open to everyone" whereas if you read ServerFault's purported scope it is explictly limited to "system and network administrators needing expert answers related to managing computer systems in a professional capacity." in seeming contraposition to StackExchange's stated goal of being free and open to everyone. The ServerFault community has traditionally advocated for an exclusionary scope.

The next few lines in StackExchange's mission statement say this, "Of course, all this information is worthless if you can't find the answer you need. So we empower our communities to curate it". Therein lies the internal tension - StackExchange wants to be open to everyone but it also wants to allow the sub-communities to curate content as they see fit to some extent. Not to be grandiose but the same tension exists in many Western democracies - the juxtaposition between liberty (doing as one wishes) versus equality (treating, both legally and civically different people equally).

Back when people voted and there more than 25 people with over 1000 rep actually engaged ServerFault used to have a much more larger scope (at least in practice), questions in that large grey area between "free and open" and "curated content", things like CPanel, VirtualBox and development environment questions were more tolerated albeit with some grumbling. I seem to remember the first big push-back was the FAQ Rewrite but I think culturally it had been gaining momentum for some time.

As ServerFault's popularity grew the influx of questions in the grey area increased exponentially faster than the influx of questions and more importantly contributors in our target audience. Consequently this had a few effects: 1) it lowered the overall quality of the site as there were less "qualified" people to answer more questions, 2) it disenfranchised the parts of the community advocating for a narrow scope and consequently they participated less or left the site altogether, and 3) it disenfranchised all the people expecting a "free and open" model when they showed up, got fishslapped with a VTC and then they summarily declared that we are all a bunch of dicks.

This situation sucks. Folks like Pedro Sousa and Michael J Mulligan are stuck in the middle of what I believe is really a culture war between the small (and rapidly shrinking) ServerFault community and the rest of the StackExchange network. Or framed less adversially, between those advocating a "curate the content" model versus a "free and open" model. The StackOverflow/StackExchange culture is much, much larger than the remaining ServerFault community and consequently they are "winning" by sheer numbers. And as the ServerFault community loses ground on the site they feel they have helped create they respond with increasing frustration, quickness to VTC and general brutality against the trespassers who have happened to have stepped into a four year long debate they didn't even know was there.

In short. Don't take it personally.

Please indulge my bit of amateur anthropology here...

I think the other answers here have done a great job distinguishing between closing a question due to a "lack of professionalism" versus "not being about professional system administration"; however seeing as you are coming here from StackOverflow I want to bring up another piece of the cultural history of ServerFault.

The ServerFault community and the greater StackOverflow/StackExchange community are not in consensuses about the scope of this site. StackExchange is explicitly billing its mission as to be "free and open to everyone" whereas if you read ServerFault's purported scope it is explictly limited to "system and network administrators needing expert answers related to managing computer systems in a professional capacity." in seeming contraposition to StackExchange's stated goal of being free and open to everyone. The ServerFault community has traditionally advocated for an exclusionary scope.

The next few lines in StackExchange's mission statement say this, "Of course, all this information is worthless if you can't find the answer you need. So we empower our communities to curate it". Therein lies the internal tension - StackExchange wants to be open to everyone but it also wants to allow the sub-communities to curate content as they see fit to some extent. Not to be grandiose but the same tension exists in many Western democracies - the juxtaposition between liberty (doing as one wishes) versus equality (treating, both legally and civically different people equally).

Back when people voted and there more than 25 people with over 1000 rep actually engaged ServerFault used to have a much more larger scope (at least in practice), questions in that large grey area between "free and open" and "curated content", things like CPanel, VirtualBox and development environment questions were more tolerated albeit with some grumbling. I seem to remember the first big push-back was the FAQ Rewrite but I think culturally it had been gaining momentum for some time.

As ServerFault's popularity grew the influx of questions in the grey area increased exponentially faster than the influx of questions and more importantly contributors in our target audience. Consequently this had a few effects: 1) it lowered the overall quality of the site as there were less "qualified" people to answer more questions, 2) it disenfranchised the parts of the community advocating for a narrow scope and consequently they participated less or left the site altogether, and 3) it disenfranchised all the people expecting a "free and open" model when they showed up, got fishslapped with a VTC and then they summarily declared that we are all a bunch of dicks.

This situation sucks. Folks like Pedro Sousa and Michael J Mulligan are stuck in the middle of what I believe is really a culture war between the small (and rapidly shrinking) ServerFault community and the rest of the StackExchange network. Or framed less adversially, between those advocating a "curate the content" model versus a "free and open" model. The StackOverflow/StackExchange culture is much, much larger than the remaining ServerFault community and consequently they are "winning" by sheer numbers. And as the ServerFault community loses ground on the site they feel they have helped create they respond with increasing frustration, quickness to VTC and general brutality against the trespassers who have happened to have stepped into a four year long debate they didn't even know was there.

In short. Don't take it personally.