Are we becoming too judgmental about questions relating to "professionalism"?

Question

It seems odd to me that this question (Windows XP procedurally drop packets) is currently flagged for issues on being "professional."

When did this site become so judgmental and only accept questions that it wants to answer?

For all we know the OP in this question is asking a professional question here. There could be many reasons that he is constrained to a specific (legacy) OS, and perhaps he is unable to elaborate on what those constraints are. Some people do have Non-Disclosure Agreements or other corporate policies that limit what they are allowed to say "outside the walls."

Flagging this question for professionalism seems completely inappropriate to me.

EDIT:

I wanted to clarify my perspective on this subject.

I think that when we close a question for not being professional when there are possible unknown extenuating circumstances, I feel that it defeats the purpose of the site.

For example, we say this question is not professional because the OP is using the wrong tool for the job.

The OP has a problem, and is asking for help. We (the community) have a few choices. We can say "this is not professional," or we could answer the OP's question, or we could guide the OP a little.

Perhaps a comment stating:

"It really is not a good idea to do this this way. Normally, you would want to configure this on your router. If you need help on how to do that, update your question and someone can answer it accordingly. If there are extenuating circumstances, call them out so people understand and can help you accordingly"

Or, we can choose to answer the OP's question, similarly to how Jim G did. While some people in the community might view this as a help vampire, those people are not obligated to help. There may be people who decide to take their time to help the OP.

If, however, we label the question as not being professional, I think that we leave an OP confused. They now need to ask themselves a lot of questions. At a minimum they would likely ask themselves "What about my question was unprofessional? How do I reword it to get an answer to my problem without sounding unprofessional?" And sometimes, trying to answer these questions yourself can be very difficult.

I think that part of being a professional is to be helpful.

If for example, someone at your office came to your desk and asked you how to solve this question, would you send them away telling them "Your question is not professional, come back when it is" or would you take a minute to give them that simple comment example I wrote above? I would hope that as a professional, you wouldn't simply turn people away like this at your place of business.

Answer 1

I don't think we're judgemental enough.

Windows XP isn't a Sever OS. We have never supported using Windows XP as a server, we routinely close questions that use Windows XP as a server for this reason - it really isn't relevant to professional system administration.

In the past we have supported people who deployed/managed XP in their environment, though we have never supported end users. Windows XP is past it's end of life, we will likely start to be less supportive of people still managing it and will almost certainly stop supporting people trying to deploy it.

Part of being professional is using the right tools for the job and managing the lifecycle of those tools. The question you link to demonstrates a failure to do both.

All in all I think closing the question as not being relevant to professional system administration was a good call.

Answer 2

Please indulge my bit of amateur anthropology here...

I think the other answers here have done a great job distinguishing between closing a question due to a "lack of professionalism" versus "not being about professional system administration"; however seeing as you are coming here from StackOverflow I want to bring up another piece of the cultural history of ServerFault.

The ServerFault community and the greater StackOverflow/StackExchange community are not in consensuses about the scope of this site. StackExchange is explicitly billing its mission as to be "free and open to everyone" whereas if you read ServerFault's purported scope it is explictly limited to "system and network administrators needing expert answers related to managing computer systems in a professional capacity." in seeming contraposition to StackExchange's stated goal of being free and open to everyone. The ServerFault community has traditionally advocated for an exclusionary scope.

The next few lines in StackExchange's mission statement say this, "Of course, all this information is worthless if you can't find the answer you need. So we empower our communities to curate it". Therein lies the internal tension - StackExchange wants to be open to everyone but it also wants to allow the sub-communities to curate content as they see fit to some extent. Not to be grandiose but the same tension exists in many Western democracies - the juxtaposition between liberty (doing as one wishes) versus equality (treating, both legally and civically different people equally).

Back when people voted and there more than 25 people with over 1000 rep actually engaged ServerFault used to have a much more larger scope (at least in practice), questions in that large grey area between "free and open" and "curated content", things like CPanel, VirtualBox and development environment questions were more tolerated albeit with some grumbling. I seem to remember the first big push-back was the FAQ Rewrite but I think culturally it had been gaining momentum for some time.

As ServerFault's popularity grew the influx of questions in the grey area increased exponentially faster than the influx of questions and more importantly contributors in our target audience. Consequently this had a few effects: 1) it lowered the overall quality of the site as there were less "qualified" people to answer more questions, 2) it disenfranchised the parts of the community advocating for a narrow scope and consequently they participated less or left the site altogether, and 3) it disenfranchised all the people expecting a "free and open" model when they showed up, got fishslapped with a VTC and then they summarily declared that we are all a bunch of dicks.

This situation sucks. Folks like Pedro Sousa and Michael J Mulligan are stuck in the middle of what I believe is really a culture war between the small (and rapidly shrinking) ServerFault community and the rest of the StackExchange network. Or framed less adversially, between those advocating a "curate the content" model versus a "free and open" model. The StackOverflow/StackExchange culture is much, much larger than the remaining ServerFault community and consequently they are "winning" by sheer numbers. And as the ServerFault community loses ground on the site they feel they have helped create they respond with increasing frustration, quickness to VTC and general brutality against the trespassers who have happened to have stepped into a four year long debate they didn't even know was there.

In short. Don't take it personally.

Answer 3

The issue is not with the choice of Windows XP, the issue is that he's trying to use the wrong tool for the job.

A professional sysadmin wouldn't be trying to do this on a client OS - they would be doing it on a router/transparent bridge device.

That said - he did get an answer that basically told him to do this, and how to do it, and I don't think it should have been closed (although I am more relaxed regarding content than most of the other high rep users on the site). But five other people did.

Answer 4

I entirely agree with everything the other two answers say. However, something that occurred to me reading your question was your use of the word professional. You use it, or variants, 12 times in your question, and each time it's as a word on its own.

The two answers, however, almost entirely use professional immediately followed by system administration (or equivalent).

I think that may identify a significant error in your assumptions about the issue. Iain makes a similar comment above, but I thought this was such an important misunderstanding that it was worth pulling out into an answer.

We're not after some nebulous form of professionalism here, some general code of conduct that suggests appropriateness for the workplace. Despite what you think, we're not closing questions to send the message "Your question is not professional, come back when it is".

As the close text says, we're closing questions because they're not about professional system administration. There is some discussion about exactly what that comprises, but it seems to have strong elements of "I'm trying to do something that would be normal in a production setup" and "I have the necessary basic skillset to do it".

A question that satisfies those is, at least to me, entirely on-topic and worthy of assistance, however badly-written or incomplete it is. It may take some clarification, some teasing-out of details in comments, and that's fine. But a question that doesn't satisfy those on the face of it should be closed, for this is simply not the place for it.