Timeline for What should Server Fault do with questions about web hosting control panels?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
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| Oct 17, 2023 at 8:09 | comment | added | Nikita Kipriyanov | I know this is ancient but have to answer to @voretaq7: the answer "You can't do that with webmin" might be good, but this is the kind of answers that get obsolete quicky. They may add some functionality so some "no" answer becomes wrong. They may remove some functionality, so some "do this way" answer becomes invalid. We can't track it here and we shouldn't. Such answers are best given by the front line support which we are not. So it seems the best is to not to attempt to cross-breed bears and bees, so to not to answer any questions about panels, or only answer with "ask your vendor". | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 18:09 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @MichaelHampton Fair enough, but I think we have enough tools at our disposal already for squashing crappy questions about crappy control panels without needing to add additional complexity to our close criteria; I don't feel like we really have need of some kind of a software blacklist, as good as it might feel to prominently display. And one of these years, the unicorn of an interesting, well-researched, well-asked control panel question might just show up (Ok, I'm kidding myself). | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 2:47 | comment | added | voretaq7 Mod | Also particularly in regard to your last category (trying to work around the tendrils of a cpanel-like front-end to manage the server by hand), I think it bears repeating that "Sometimes the answer is NO" (or "Don't Do That!"). We don't have to bend over backwards to find a solution if the best practice is to replace the system and be rid of the control panel: Explain why that is the case, and close future similar questions as a duplicate of the canonical "You can't do that with webmin" question. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 2:45 | comment | added | voretaq7 Mod |
I would argue that your third category and a 4th category - Installation and maintenance of a control panel are a sysadmin task (versus a webmaster task), and are not off topic in and of themselves. There are best practices for doing both of those things (and while most unix admins would argue that the best practice for third-party control panels is not to install them to begin with we all know that sometimes our jobs preclude following best practices....)
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| Apr 9, 2015 at 22:09 | comment | added | Michael Hampton Mod | @ShaneMadden I'm not saying it should be off topic because it's crappy. In fact, it's not really crappy... I'm saying it should be off topic because it's unsupportable. | |
| Apr 9, 2015 at 22:08 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod |
I have yet to see a single one that was both high quality (or even medium quality!) and answerable by normal system administrators - Do we see many of those at all (about managing the panel), even bad ones? I agree that I haven't seen any good ones (though I haven't been looking), but I'm not sure if we should declare a software package as off-topic just because it's crappy; if we go down that road we'll need to apply the same treatment to, say, sharepoint and nagios too (I kid, I kid). Why not just add them to ignored tags and let them sit unanswered?
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| Apr 9, 2015 at 21:47 | history | answered | Michael HamptonMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |