Stack Overflow is so large that it is not possible for any single person to read even the titles of every question posted there on a given day, let alone all of the questions. However, Server Fault, while fairly large, is still small enough that someone could at least read all the titles of all the questions posted. Some people do this, and as a result, they see the quality issues.

But you have hit upon one of SF's big problems: Many people asking questions here are not only not professional, they are not even system administrators. As a result, we end up with two classes of low quality questions: Those where the user is asking for technical support, and those where the user has absolutely no idea what he's doing and would need to read several books before he could understand an answer.

In a way, we're victims of Stack Exchange's success. As the SE network grows it gains authority in Google, drawing more people here from the Internet. Most of those have no idea what they're doing, or aren't the target audience, and they ask the low quality and blatantly off-topic questions, even after being told they are off-topic.

SF is not and was never intended to be "I am a sysadmin; AMA". But many visitors from SO and from the rest of the Internet treat it as exactly that.

When we do manage to attract someone in our target audience, they often do something similar to you: They ask and answer questions in tags of interest. Later, many of them will look around the rest of the site out of sheer curiosity. Then they will see the "river of crap", as Iain puts it, and begin following the road to burning out on the site, or they are just scared off immediately.

I don't know of a good solution to this: How do we scare off people who are not our target audience, instead of scaring off those who are? At the moment we have exactly the opposite of what we want.

Stack Overflow is so large that it is not possible for any single person to read even the titles of every question posted there on a given day, let alone all of the questions. However, Server Fault, while fairly large, is still small enough that someone could at least read all the titles of all the questions posted. Some people do this, and as a result, they see the quality issues.

But you have hit upon one of SF's big problems: Many people asking questions here are not only not professional, they are not even system administrators. As a result, we end up with two classes of low quality questions: Those where the user is asking for technical support, and those where the user has absolutely no idea what he's doing and would need to read several books before he could understand an answer.

In a way, we're victims of Stack Exchange's success. As the SE network grows it gains authority in Google, drawing more people here from the Internet. Most of those have no idea what they're doing, or aren't the target audience, and they ask the low quality and blatantly off-topic questions, even after being told they are off-topic.

SF is not and was never intended to be "I am a sysadmin; AMA". But many visitors from SO and from the rest of the Internet treat it as exactly that.

When we do manage to attract someone in our target audience, they often do something similar to you: They ask and answer questions in tags of interest. Later, many of them will look around the rest of the site out of sheer curiosity. Then they will see the "river of crap", as Iain puts it, and begin following the road to burning out on the site, or they are just scared off immediately.

I don't know of a good solution to this: How do we scare off people who are not our target audience, instead of scaring off those who are? At the moment we have exactly the opposite of what we want.