When to post on Serverfault vs Stackoverflow?

Question

I've just started using Stackoverflow, and it's been very useful. I asked a question once on here that was much more technical (decoding a wordpress hack), but I'm confused in general about why to use Serverfault over Stackoverflow.

I tend to read and post questions/answers about: Wordpress, PHP, Amazon EC2.

My assumption is that if something seems "more technical" then SF would be the right place for it, but if something is coding-related then probably SO.

Is this correct? How do you determine where to post your questions between these two sites?

Answer 1

Code-questions on SF tend to be focused on scripting and automation, and even those are getting foisted off to SO these days (they didn't used to). Information Security questions relating to code-specific items used to be somewhat topical here, but they're now going over to security.stackexchange.com.

In general, SF is more about installation, configuration, and automation. For something as general-purpose as PHP:

• Installing it to a production server: ServerFault
• Installing it to a home server: SuperUser
• Digging into exactly how a security fault is a fault: Security
• Figuring out how to code around a fault you can't fix right now: StackOverflow, or possibly Security.
• Installing modules: ServerFault

As for Wordpress, there is a Wordpress StackExchange site just for that. Though even they punt install/config stuff back to us.

---

One thing I forgot to note is that our faq (currently) leads off with:

Server Fault is for system administrators and desktop support professionals, people who manage or maintain computers in a professional capacity.

It's the 'professional capacity' thing that trips a lot of people up. We're not about general server stuff here, we're about specific problems that arise in the day to day work-place of systems administrators. This is why people with servers in their home find their questions shuffled off to SuperUser, even though the answer would be nearly identical had it been in their workplace.

Answer 2

Review the FAQ on each site; they outline what types of questions are on topic.

Answer 3

Code questions that remain on SF tend to be How can I automate X using Y?, or What collection of commands do I run to find out X?, with X being in the context of system administration problems (deploying patches to a large network, figuring out how much RAM/CPU is being used by a program). Any questions that require in-depth software design and hours of coding are likely to be foisted off on StackOverflow.

To address your specific question categories:

• Wordpress
  Like sysadmin1138 said, There's a Stack for that.
• PHP depends on the question:
  • Questions about setting up PHP on a server are on topic.
  • Questions about setting up PHP extensions on a server are possibly on topic
  • Questions about writing code in PHP are off topic.
• Amazon EC2 Depends on the question:
  • Asking us to tell you how something works or how Amazon handles something, or how much something will cost is likely to be closed with Go ask your provider (Amazon).
  • Asking about EC2 APIs is likely to be sent to StackOverflow (it's programming).
  • Asking "system administration" questions (the kind of stuff we'd normally accept per the FAQ) is fine.