Can we do anything to change the dynamic of the site?

Question

This came up in relation to the upcoming mod election, e.g. Dennis' question here, and tombull89's and Iain's comments here, but I think the discussion of this shouldn't be limited to "what do the the candidates think they would do to change/improve SF?"

I don't know if everyone would completely agree with Iain's comment, but I suspect most of the regulars would agree there is a problem, and this is not a bad way of summarizing it:

SF is no longer by professionals for professionals it is by professionals for amateurs and if you try to fix it then you're considered hostile and unfriendly

So the purpose of this question is to focus on whether there's anything anyone (mods, users, SE staff (?)) can do to improve the disconnect between the professional sysadmins that the site is supposed to be aimed at and other people who use the site.

Answer 1

My general thoughts --

---

First we need to (re)define what our scope and target audience is.

Our FAQ currently says "Information Technology Professionals" -- this was arrived at after much debating during the great FAQ rewrite (sffaq) because we did not want to exclude members of our target audience of system, network, DB, etc. admins.

The more I think about this the more I think we were too broad: developers are "Information Technology Professionals", and many of the clueless masses doubtless consider themselves so.
Perhaps we should consider narrowing the scope of that line to more clearly define who we are looking to serve.

Along the same lines, we have had many discussions on Meta about the requirements of a "professional", but those are not articulated anywhere in the FAQ.
I believe we should spend some time crafting a FAQ section that specifically addresses what professional means in the context of Server Fault.

---

Then we need to enforce it.

This means closing questions that are clearly not a fit for the site -- most of which fall into a few categories:

• Too basic The asker lacks the requisite technical background to understand what they're asking.
  Questions like "How do I get a list of IP addresses on an interface?" fall in this category.
  Often the user isn't even the system/network admin of the environment in question, in which case these questions really belong on one of Unix & Linux, Super User, Ask Different, or Ask Ubuntu.

• No Research These are the "How do I make Apache log the remote IP?" or "Give me a tutorial on X" questions -- the answer is plainly available in documentation (or a Google search), and the asker is being lazy.

• No Troubleshooting
  "Apache is giving me a 404 error - HELP!" type questions.
  These are often asked by 1-2 year junior admins (or people thrown into an admin role without experience) who are apparently mortally terrified of asking their superiors questions or admitting they don't know something.
  As a result they ask lousy, unanswerable questions. We have a meta topic to guide them toward writing a good question, and this sort of rot should be closed with a link pointing there (and reopened if fixed).

---

The Summer of Love and The Winter of Our Discontent

I don't like that Server Fault has a reputation of being "the mean Stack Exchange site".

I also don't think it's spilling any great secrets that Stack Exchange doesn't really want one of their sites viewed as mean either (after all they thrive on traffic, and mean sites don't get much traffic). The growing hostility toward new users (mainly on Stack Overflow and Server Fault) was the impetus behind last year's Summer of Love.

That said, in order to keep Server Fault from becoming "Technical Support For The Intertubes" there is an extent to which we must disappoint the clueless masses who think that's why we're here.

System Administration has a time-honored tradition of "Read The Fscking Manual" for a reason -- those who can read and interpret documentation and apply what they've learned to new situations will likely become good sysadmins, and those who can't (or won't out of laziness) are frankly not suited to be professional system administrators.

Enforcing this 40-plus-year-old cultural standard with neophytes is how the profession self regulates. There's nothing wrong with doing so here, as long as we don't devolve into berating people in comments.
Remember that we are a site for professionals, which means that the main site should always maintain a level of professional decorum and courtesy, even when we're telling someone they're in the wrong place or their groundwork doesn't meet our standards.

Answer 2

I thought I'd chime in my with 2c here because I am a programmer, not a network admin, and am probably one of those people you talk about that are not really wanted here.

I don't have a problem with that, but I wanted to let you know that your site doesn't communicate that fact very well, and thought I'd share my experience.

First off, I'm familiar with the SE network, so the very first thing I do when I go to a new SE site is read the FAQ. (Or at very least, read the top editable section of the FAQ.)

At the very top of your FAQ you say

Server Fault is for Information Technology Professionals needing expert answers related to managing computer systems in a professional capacity.

Now I consider myself an IT professional, so when I need help managing my computer system in a professional capacity, I come here to post my question. But to me, it seems like what you really mean to say here is

Server Fault is for Professional System/Network Administrators to get expert answers from other system/network admins related to managing their computer systems in a professional capacity.

(Sorry, I don't know if there's a major difference between system administrators, or network administrators. I'm more familiar with the term Network Administrator, although it seems like you guys prefer to use the term System Administrators. To me, sysadmins are just people who manages any system, not necessarily a computer/network system.)

The other big problem I see is how your site is described.

For example, I always have a horrible time remembering when to ask here and when to ask on Super User, so I usually click on the Ask Question button to see what it says in the How to Ask box:

Is your question about professional server, networking, or related infrastructure administration?

That doesn't say anything at all to hint that you only want questions from professional System/Network admins. You may want to consider changing that to something like

Are you a professional System Administrator, and is your question about professional server, networking, or related infrastructure administration?

The problem isn't just how your site is described internally, but also how it's described externally, by other well-meaning users.

I often see people on Stack Overflow recommending users bring their technical server-related questions here. They probably got that impression because of how your own site is described in the FAQ, and that can probably only be improved upon with time and patience educating users about what sort of site you are.

Your scope is also not correctly described out in many posts I see regarding Stack Exchange's history. For example, the wikipedia article about Stack Exchange only says

Server Fault for questions related to system administration and Super User for questions from computer "power users".

That sort of content needs to be clarified so that

Server Fault for questions by system administrators ...

(I also checked out your /About page just now for the very first time, and that looks good. Unfortunately, the /About page is often dismissed quickly by new users, and is not displayed at all to existing users unless they seek it out.)

Most SE sites are based on a topic, not an audience, which I think is why your site is special and needs to specifically specify what sort of audience your site is for in addition to the topic.

Anyways, figured I'd throw my experience in an answer here in case it helps. Hope you get the site worked out, and I'll try and correct people if I see them incorrectly sending SO users here. :)

Answer 3

The quality of content coming in needs to be drastically pruned. I remember a few times where Iain spot-checked all of the questions on the front page, and over half of them were consistently from users with almost no rep on SF, but a lot of rep on SO or Programmers. This is a continuation of the same issue that got SF removed from SO's migration list. However, instead of asking on SO and having crap migrated here, it seems like developers are asking directly. In most cases pro developers are not pro sysadmins and ask ridiculous questions or questions that people with even a tiny drop of experience wouldn't care about one bit.

Combine this with the "drive-by" questions that happen all the time from a new user that asks a garbage question and never comes back to edit/update and you've got a major content problem.

We've tried being welcoming and we've tried accepting "newbie" questions, since - yes - everyone needs to start somewhere, but it's obviously not working. If something isn't a well thought out and worthwhile question from a pro admin, it needs to die an immediate and painful death and the people killing it need to have no remorse.

I know that SE cares about pageviews and that's fine, but the pageviews that low quality content brings in will also bring in more low quality users. If all that SE cares about are views, then they're on the right track. If they actually care about content, then things need to change quickly. The Summer of Love was last year. We need a Summer of Relentless Massacre.

---

Just to prove my point, here is a screencap of the current front page with sadfaces for every question that could be answered with RTFM or that is shopping or otherwise inappropriate.

In fact, NINE out of these 10 are from users that have more rep on SO than on SF, meaning that they are likely developers and not IT pros. I know that this isn't the only measure of an IT pro and it certainly isn't the only measure of being able to ask a relevant question, but it strikes right to the heart of the problem. Server Fault really is no longer By IT Pros for IT Pros.

Answer 4

I am likely known for expressing minority's views here on meta, but as I feel there might be a constructive contribution from my digital-culture background here it goes nonetheless:

The discussion seems to boil down to the conclusion that the site has changed lately and now a hard core of skilled brave sysadmins is facing the challenge of answering zillions of pointless questions of a noob legion. And that there is an urgent need to change that, otherwise Sparta will fall.

A different viewpoint:

1. this is not unique to ServerFault - it has happened before, it will happen again

From my previous years spent in various newsgroups I can assure you that after a short establishment phase every community has similar tensions if the group of "regulars" is not renewing fast enough. I believe most of the ServerFault regular crew have read Eric Steven Raymond's "How to ask questions - the smart way" at some point and kept nodding at every line of the longish text. This text has been originally written in 2001, is targeting the "noob" audience and mentioning all the problems we seemingly have to struggle with. It obviously predates StackExchange and most of the forums available today. There is at least one high-profile example which is 20 years old by now, with basically the same tune but not as formalized as the "smart questions howto" - the Eternal September.

2. this is by no means surprising - and there will be no way to change it

This site's regulars mostly are sysadmins with years of experience. Naturally, the number of experienced sysadmins with spare time on their hands and a wish to participate in a social network aligned to their profession is rather limited. On the other hand, as the volume of this site is constantly rising, so is its attractiveness to sysadmins in general - because reading the ServerFault content does not require experience, spare time or the wish to participate and give back to the community but is giving a strong signal: people are getting their problems solved by just posting here. So the slope in expertise from the regulars to the newcomers is only natural. And as the experienced sysadmin pool is growing significantly slower than the site's attractiveness for the much larger pool of non-experienced sysadmins, the grade of the slope is continuously increasing.

3. stop whining - there is no one forcing you to read bullshit

The Usenet's answer to the large inflow of low-quality posts has been plonking (ignoring certain users), post scoring and keyword filtering. It has shown to work rather well for years and we have similar means of filtering content here at StackExchange. The key points:

• there certainly is no obligation to read each and every single question posted
• we do not have to close or delete everything which is not meeting quality standards within 3 hours. No matter what the broken window blog post has to say about it - the primary tool to handle low-quality questions should be downvoting as
  1. "this is bullshit" is exactly what a downvote means
  2. it is sufficiently lightweight
  3. we simply could let the low-quality posts hang around for a while and bulk-close them with little effort if they have not attracted any attention for a while (which is what naturally happens to low-quality questions).
• we might learn to use available means of filtering posts in an efficient way and ask the StackExchange devs for more efficient tools as we notice we need them

____ The bottom line

The influx of bullshit and badly-written questions seems as elementary as the universe's tendence to entropy. There is no abolishing of the forces of nature, you can't fix stupid, so we might as well just learn how to live with that.

Answer 5

Can we do anything to change the dynamic of the site?

YES. We can all* vote more!

I see lots of suggestions here for dealing with bad questions and content but I actually think as a community we already have that part figured out. Anyone who is an active participant on ServerFault can pretty quickly identify content that doesn't fit well with the site. A question or answer is bad or incorrect? Downvote it. A question or answer is off-topic? Vote to Close. The only additional thing I think we could improve upon is leaving polite comments on why a new user's question was downvoted or closed. Perhaps a set of standardized comments could be integrated into the Review UI or we could all just start using Greasemonkey.

I think we need to ask the question the other way around. Instead of asking, "How can we stem the flow of bad questions and content?" maybe we should be asking "How can we encourage good content and make sure it quickly floats to the top?". I think they're are a few ways we can do this: 1) Reassess our audience, 2) reassess our scope and 3) vote more. I'll address each in turn.

1) Reassess our audience

This has been talked about ad-nasuem and is pretty well covered in many of the topicality questions on Meta. As @Rachel points out I think it's pretty clear that the Server Fault is for Information Technology Professionals line in the FAQ might better be stated as Server Fault is for Professional System/Network Administrators. I don't want anyone to think that I'm advocating being anti-developer or anti-DevOps. If you are a developer, or a network engineer or an Extreme-Agile-DevOps person and you are working as a Systems/Network Administrator in a professional capacity and your question meets the standards expected of a professional in that field then your question is completely and totally on topic in that respect. You know how they say, "On the Internet, nobody knows you are dog", well, "On ServerFault, nobody knows you are a developer" if your question is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from a question posted by someone in a more traditional Operations role.

The problem with stating that the audience is Information Technology Professionals is that all of a sudden a whole host of things that not relevant to Systems Operations look very relevant and very on-topic. These are questions like, "How do I make my XAMPP/LAMP/WAMP installer work?", or "How do I get IP tables?" and so on. After all, Developers are Information Technology Professionals and their question relates to their work in a professional capacity (as in, I can't code because I can't get this System thing to work), so they come here, post their question, get fishslapped and then go away and say that we are mean. This isn't helpful to us and isn't helpful them.

I think that the Information Technology Professionals scope really has the potential to turn ServerFault from a place for Operations folks to talk about Operation-y things (a good thing!) to Operations folks doing tech support (a bad thing!). Just look at the screen cap of the front page in @MDMarra's answer - we are being treated like tech support for SO. And I'm not the only one that feels this way.

2) Reassess our scope

I like to think I'm a good example of ServerFault's target audience. I'm a Junior Systems/Network Administrator for a governmental organization with about 500 users. I've been working professionally in IT for about four years. I have a decent grasp of the basics. I have a whole bunch of questions that I would love to ask here because there's so much experience and I know I will receive high quality answers.

Unfortunately, the questions I am interested in asking fall into three general categories: a) They are soft-skills questions, b) they are highly specific technical questions, and c) they a very general systems building architecture questions.

• a) Soft skill questions like "What kind of format works for technical resumes?", "Is it worth getting a NetApp certification for a job with the following duties?" are all off-topic on ServerFault for good reasons.

• b) I don't ask questions that are highly specific to technical problems because I expect that they will get closed as either To Localized or go unanswered due to the deep-knowledge issue addressed by sysadmin1138 in the Why "professional capacity"? question. An examples of these kinds of questions would be a very ugly periodic issue with Samba's RID to UID/GID mapping that would break NTLM authentication to our Squid Proxy Server that nagged us for over a year before it was resolved upstream by the Samba team. I find that I often push these questions to either payed support or to development/technical mailing lists with good results.

• c) I don't ask general systems building architecture questions because I expect them to get closed for not being specific enough (so NARQ or NC). Honestly, this is where I think ServerFault could really shine. An example of a question along these lines are, "How can I bring configuration management (along with documented change and revision control) to a Windows Server environment using tools like SCCM, PowerShell, MDT, WAIK in a manner similar to what Puppet or Chef can do for Linux?" or "How can I introduce Windows Core to our Test/Production tiers while keeping the Full Install at the Development tier without running into integration issues during applications deployment?" I think these are great examples of Good Subjective questions (see (Good Subjective vs. Bad Subjective)[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/]) but there's no doubt in my mind they'd be closed. Like I said, I think these kinds of systems building or architecture design Good Subjective questions really should have a home here and really could be an area where ServerFault really excels as a resource for professionals.

3) Vote More

So what's a guy like me to do on ServerFault then? How about answer some of the newbie questions? I like answering questions. I get to explore problems or topics that I wouldn't typically, I get to help people and I often learn something new.

Here's the problem, no votes. I won't pretend that my answers are anything that special but it is incredibly frustrating to roll up my sleeves, grab a unloved question that has potential but needs a little polish and roll out a decent answer and then no one bothers to up or down vote, either the improved question or my half-way decent stab at an answer (see here or here. I can't imagine how frustrated the old guard feels when they're repeating this process for the 90 millionth time.

As someone who is only an occasional participant in ServerFault I can't say I'm really a part of the community here but even I try to get a dozen or so votes in a day. That's pretty horrible by most standards but around here unless things significantly changed since Ward's Call to Arms for voting, it's apparently not that bad:

Someone who votes every other day, and manages 11 votes each time, will rack up just over 2000 votes in a year. There are only 5 people who've done that much voting so far this year (yay!), and a grand total of 13 who look like they might get there by the end of the year.

In summation, here's me, right smack in the target audience and I rarely have any questions worth asking, no one up (or down!) votes my answers or edited questions and all I really do on ServerFault is the necessary but admittedly tedious task of wading through the Review Queue. Eventually, I'm going to get bored of doing that and I'll stop using the site altogether and while I can't imagine that my inactivity will be of any great loss to the community, if experts like Ian and John Gardiner aren't interested in participating and the people that eventually (after an admittedly long time) become experts like me aren't interested in participating, ServerFault is doomed.

(*except for Ward)

Answer 6

This might seem a bit naive however I've been wondering if a revision to the signup / anonymous question asking process might help. Effectively the same way a lot of organizations require users to have read and understand their terms of service before being granted access to their account. It would equate to effectively require reading and agreeing to the FAQ terms first.

Half a dozen multiple choice questions about the scope, intended audience, etc could do wonders especially if phrased as questions about the askers background.

If done right this should dramatically cut the halp halp questions. If properly formed the login page could even punt those folks to superuser or stackoverflow. Anyone that ignores what they've learned through the signup process would be asking for a rude reception.

Just sayin.

Answer 7

Personally, I would like to see either a clarification or the scope, or a change of it. "IT Professionals" does not just mean Sys/Net Admin/Engineer. "IT Professional" to me includes Developers.

If we want "SysAds asking questions of SysAds", change the scope of the site to do so.

Yes, the crappy, clueless, and not-even-googled questions bother me, too. So I either vote, ignore, or close quickly.

Even though he and I disagree on some points, I'm sad to see Iain go, because I think that he is a good mod. But this site is supposed to be a community for helping people, and being rude and unhelpful doesn't get us anything; it kills the community. If you're frustrated, don't come by; that's not helpful.

Basically all of Why the hostility?

---

Additionally, with SysAds being very self-reliant, and our culture being very RTFM- and Self-Service-friendly I propose the following addition to the FAQ:

"Questions are expected to have had at least a basic fundamental level of research and effort put into them. If you have not done some basic analysis (checked the relevant logs, network captures, checked our Canonical Question list, etc), and at least checked popular search engines for your question, your question may be considered of value due to lack of effort on your part."

Answer 8

This answer is more in regards to MDMarra's and others comments about keeping "smart/talented" experts here often and attracting newbies with some merit and worth.

I will probably get downvoted over and over for this (I'm thick skinned)...but I think you have to offer up more bling/swag.

1. Put an "accomplishments" notice sidebar or similar with notable achievements for the day/week/month for users to gawk at along with the top questions of the week. "Whoa Ward hit 10k that guy rocks!" "MDMarra answered 85 questions this week, that guy's busy), etc.
2. Incentives - Give a guy a t-shirt/button/blogsite/"this space reserved for Evan"/whatever for hitting 10k/20k/etc. Something tangible to work towards that helps drive people to come here and want to stick around.
3. Offer up "lunch and learns"/webinars. Let folks with 30k+ rep share their knowledge on a subject via a Webex or similar every now and then.