Why are moderators/high rep users focused on narrowing the scope of SF?

Question

As a systems admin I often come on here looking for the answer to an obscure question. The best way to get an answer to that is to have the widest audience/knowledgebase possible, not the most specialised one. I don't care who asked or answered my question, be it another sysadmin, a developer or shock horror a home user/amateur.

We need good quality questions but who cares if there are noobish questions too, that is what search is for. No one is obliged to answer anything they don't want to.

It doesn't matter if there is collateral help for others in the process of working in the interests of the sysadmin. The current focus on trying to expel these other people at all costs harms the usefulness of the site to those like me, the target professional sysadmin!

Is the current focus helping make the place more useful or are people trying too hard to be orderly?

Addn: the idea of this is for people to stop and question their assumptions and open a discussion. Not for the vocal minority to shoot it down without considering what is best for the site or the wants of majority of users.

Answer 1

Why are moderators/high rep users focused on narrowing the scope of SF?

I can't speak for everyone but I'm not interested in narrowing the scope at all, I am however very interested in maintaining the scope as laid out in the Help pages.

I think the difference in approach here is best illustrated by your first paragraph, most, such as yourself, come to SF looking for answers - while others, inherently high-rep users come to SF to provide those answers. We therefore are always going to have more concerns about the quality of questions on the site that those for whom it's simply a drop-in convenience.

We invest a great deal of our time into the site, agree with the SE team's aims for the site and simply want to enforce that focus by doing what we can to educate users before they veer away from those aims.

Again I can only speak for myself but I also don't care WHO asks questions, only that they're on topic for the site and adhere to our requirements as shown in the Help pages.

Answer 2

Taking your initial post somewhat out of order, my responses follow.
This is probably massively TL;DR, but you really brought it upon yourself :-)

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As a systems admin I often come on here looking for the answer to an obscure question.

Excellent. That's what we're here for.

We need good quality questions but who cares if there are noobish questions too, that is what search is for.

We need good questions. It does not matter who is asking them so long as they fit the scope and intent of the site.

Certain "noobish" questions are simply below the threshold: "How do I Unix?" is why we have Unix and Linux, "What's the default password for a Linksys Frobnitz 5000?" is why we have Google.
A Professional knows and understands these things (either inherently, or after the first time it's explained to them), and does not use ServerFault as their own personal lazyweb. Professionals do real research, make an effort to solve the problem, and post a good, answerable question of reasonable scope (i.e. something more than "Apache is broken. Halp?") for us to work with.

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The best way to get an answer to that is to have the widest audience/knowledgebase possible, not the most specialised one.

I reject your premise, because I think you mean to say the best way to get a GOOD answer.
Having the widest audience/knowledge base possible certainly guarantees an answer, but wrong or frankly stupid answers don't help anyone.

For example, "Pay the ransomware company" will stop the annoying popups your users are getting because they installed the PwnMySystem toolbar, but it doesn't solve the problem that their machines are compromised.

I don't care who asked or answered my question, be it another sysadmin, a developer or shock horror a home user/amateur.

So long as the questions and answers are of good quality I really don't care where they come from either. Similarly if a developer or home user asks a good question that is relevant in the context of professional system and network administration I have no problem with that.
Close by Regex because the question says "home network" or "I'm a Developer" somewhere is a poor standard -- if removing those words leaves you with an on-topic question the question is on-topic.

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No one is obliged to answer anything they don't want to.

Conversely, Posting a question on a Stack Exchange site does not magically entitle someone to an answer. Some questions are off topic, out of scope, or simply crap.
That's why "On Hold" exists - either the question will be improved, or it will be abandoned, but at least it's out of everyone's face and not getting hundreds of downvotes while the OP works on it.

If the OP elects not to work on a question to make it answerable or on-topic that's their choice -- I can't force them to write good questions. I won't try to force the community to answer bad ones.

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It doesn't matter if there is collateral help for others in the process of working in the interests of the sysadmin. The current focus on trying to expel these other people at all costs harms the usefulness of the site to those like me, the target professional sysadmin! Is the current focus helping make the place more useful or are people trying too hard to be orderly?

The focus is on quality.
Do you seriously think this is a high quality system administration question?
Do you think Server Fault is harmed by questions of that type being closed?

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Addn: the idea of this is for people to stop and question their assumptions and open a discussion. Not for the vocal minority to shoot it down without considering what is best for the site or the wants of majority of users.

The "vocal minority" you speak of represent a substantial number of "answerers" on the site.
The group you see represented here so far ranges from 115 to well over 2000 answers - mostly good to excellent quality.
They are also among the most active voters on the site, and many of them have asked excellent questions as well.

Frankly when those people tell me we have a quality problem I sit up and take notice - most of them are smarter than I am and tend to know what they're talking about, which makes them exactly the kind of people I want to attract to the site.

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My addition:

Gamification doesn't work forever on sysadmins - we see how the system works, and we play a different game (big game hunting for intellectual stimulation).

The E-Peen of "reputation score" isn't why we're here. We're here because we want to learn and see new/interesting things that may not come up in our environments.
If the only questions the site is attracting are ones that can be answered by literally the first result in a Google search for the question title that is not conducive to intellectual stimulation, and the site will wither and die.

Answer 3

"We need good quality questions but who cares if there are noobish questions too"

A new user asking a valid, on-topic question with decent up front info shouldn't (and most often isn't) ridiculed, closed, downvoted. Even if the question is "too easy" for one expert here it doesn't mean it should be closed because "wow, you don't know that and you're a sysadmin?"

Case in point from TODAY: Why do I need to set a hostname?

People have varying experiences throughout their career and things pop-up that are outside of someone's day to day so clarification or assistance here is always a good thing, but asking a question that falls outside of the HELP page scope isn't conducive to the questioner or the answerer.

Off-topic questions often end up here because the user failed to pick the right site for the question. Other sites exist in the SE for topicality/specialty, otherwise there should just be one giant site for all questions.

Answer 4

Firstly, a lot of us use the front page first. If the front page is full of broken window type questions, we'll end up attracting more of those. If the answer is obviously in the manual, and the person didn't look it up, and wants to be spoonfed, there's not much helping them, is there.

The unwillingness to read documentation also means the FAQ isn't read which causes more issues. Reading solves everything.

Secondly, for marginal questions, there's other sites that might work better - U&L, AU and SU. I've on occasion asked for questions to be moved cause they were perfectly good and in SU's scope. I've asked that questions be killed off, covered in lime, and buried.

I think the minimal requirements are entirely fair - That you've read the documentation, tried your best, and have documented this, and are able to put across the problem you have had and the steps you have taken. In short, questions about wicked problems are the things that Q&A works best at. I think gimmethecodez questions sort of lack a certain degree of intellectual honesty.

The 'professional' level is both for the sake of the person asking the question and the community as a whole. You have a cisco router and a dozen systems with AD in your basement? Just leave out the fact that its your basement, and say its in your workplace. If its a WRT54G running a half dozen systems, then just ask it on SU (we don't bite).

In short, if folk actually had some consideration, we wouldn't be arguing ourselves blue over this.

Answer 5

You're borderline trolling us at this point. We've discussed on numerous occasions.

We try not to focus on the person asking questions. I can't think of a single instance of anyone questioning the credentials of someone providing a valid answer. Rather we focus on the scope of the question. If you're asking questions a Professional Administrator would ask, we don't care - and this has been covered before.

If the content of the question is home-grade it should be on Super User. I don't see why you think Super User is incapable of answering these questions, but I'm offended and I don't have much reputation there. Similarly if the content of the question is developer-grade it should be on Stack Overflow. They have more people providing Answers than we could ever hope to have.

We have a statistically-backed issue with "professional answer-provider" retention.

Answer 6

We need good quality questions but who cares if there are noobish questions too, that is what search is for.

That rather depends on what you define as "noobish" doesn't it. Questions should reflect a professional standard. That doesn't mean they can't be questions at a more elementary level, but that the questions themselves should attain a certain standard quality in how well they are asked.

That has nothing to do with whether or not the question is a basic one or the person asking it is new to the profession, or even just dipping their toes in the profession.

No one is obliged to answer anything they don't want to.

I'm not sure where that came from. At no point did anyone suggest anyone was obliged, did they?

It doesn't matter if there is collateral help for others in the process of working in the interests of the sysadmin. The current focus on trying to expel these other people at all costs harms the usefulness of the site to those like me, the target professional sysadmin!

There are certain questions and people who keep asking those very poor questions, whose removal from the site is not going to hurt you, the target professional sysadmin. Your continuing professional development is not being hurt because you didn't read the question about "LOL! WHY CAN'T ANYONE IN MY OFFICE INTERNET, LOL" and yes there really are questions like that being asked.

Clearly you and I are not going to agree with one another as to where the line is drawn on what is and is not an acceptable question, but to the best of my knowledge the fundamental mission of this site since the day it was founded has been to cater to professional systems administration tasks and scenarios. If people are unable to ask questions of that standard, despite being helped, then the site is not helped by their presence. In fact several good contributors have been driven off by having to wade through too many poor questions.

If you want to maintain that people asking questions being driven off harms the site then I think I'm entitled to point out that people who answer questions being driven off the site also harms the site, so where do you suggest we balance those two requirements?

On top of this, I suspect that the people who keep asking those very low level questions are not being helped much either; we've seen situations where someone has struggled to ask a question, received help to lick it into an answerable shape and then has been totally unable to comprehend the correct answers they've received and has either given up or has pretty much demanded someone more or less do the work for them. And that's never been what this site is about.