I'm not going to rehash all the drama of the last few days surrounding our former moderator HopelessN00b's mass closing of old, off-topic questions about web hosting control panels, but something important was put on hold during that mess and needs to be revisited:
There is, and has been for years, a broad community consensus that most such questions should be closed (or migrated) and that old questions should be sought out and closed as well.
Unfortunately I do not have the time to go through and clean all of these up myself, and the person who did is no longer going to be doing so.
Nevertheless I think that we should continue to identify and close these questions, if possible, and I would like to ask you all to help.
If you have extra close votes near the end of a (UTC) day, search for such questions and vote to close them, based on the consensus criteria:
- End user questions should be closed; these are off-topic anyway, so close them using the "Questions on Server Fault must be about managing information technology systems in a business environment." off-topic reason.
- Admin questions should be closed with a custom close reason referring the user to the web hosting control panel vendor's support channels. These questions can also be flagged for migration to Webmasters if they aren't too old to migrate, and they are "about a website."they are "about a website."
- Questions where the web hosting control panel is incidental should remain open if they are otherwise on topic. These are questions where the answer would be exactly the same whether the web hosting control panel was present or not, and edited to remove extraneous references to the web hosting control panel. If you aren't sure, skip it. If such a question needs to be closed for a different reason, that reason should not mention the web hosting control panel.
I would also be very happy to see our other moderators help with this, and I'll also do so when I have time (which unfortunately won't be that much).
