Proposed change to Server Fault guidelines

Question

Following up on the discussion here, I’d like to propose some changes to our help center guidelines to remove subjective language (particularly the “professional” part) and simplify things a bit, while still maintaining a high standard of quality and a clear line of what kind of questions belong here.

Quoting, briefly, for context:

Removing the requirement to be a professional means telling these users “your question isn’t appropriate as it stands, improve it by...” instead of telling them “you don’t belong here because you aren’t what I consider to be a professional sysadmin.”

So, here’s what I was able to come up with, with some details on my thought process to follow:

Server Fault is for questions about managing information technology systems in a business environment.

If your question is about:

• managing the hardware or software of servers, workstations, storage or networks
• tools used for administering, monitoring, or automating these
• deployment to and management of third-party provided information technology platforms

and is not about:

• consumer workstations or networking (which belong on our sister site, Super User)
• working with a service provider's management interface, such as cPanel
• product, service, or learning material recommendations
• product licensing inquiries or legal advice
• career, salary, personnel, employment, or formal education
• unauthorized use or misuse of IT systems

then you’re in the right place to ask your question!

(then leaving the rest of what’s there alone)

Reasoning behind the specifics..

Server Fault is for questions about managing information technology systems in a business environment.

Edited based on TheCleaner's comment below, I think this is pretty good now!

• managing the hardware or software of servers, workstations, storage, and networks, or
• tools used for administering, monitoring, or automating these, or

Basically the old “If your question is about” criteria, but condensed.

• working with services hosting or enabling your information technology

I want this one to have inclusion of blank-as-a-service types questions, but it could probably stand to be rephrased, because we still don’t want the user end of the cpanel equation.

• consumer workstations and networking (which belongs on our sister site, Super User), or

This is rephrased a bit, but basically the same as before, and with a more immediate “if this is you, go to SU” instead of that being further down.

• unauthorized use or misuse of IT systems

Condensed the last two points: licensing moved, legal advice doesn’t really need to be here, and the rest can be summarised with just this.

Edit based on chat discussion:

For replacing the "professional" close reason and covering a gap that we'd end up with after removing it:

"Questions must demonstrate reasonable information technology management practices. Questions that relate to unsupported hardware or software platforms or unmaintained environments may not be suitable for Server Fault"

This doesn't perfectly capture what we need here, because questions about fixing a busted environment are on-topic, but we don't need perfect verbal coverage of every condition (which will make things way to wordy).

Thoughts?

Answer 1

Removing the requirement to be a professional means telling these users “your question isn’t appropriate as it stands, improve it by...” instead of telling them “you don’t belong here because you aren’t what I consider to be a professional sysadmin.

But as I understand it, the requirement has never been to be a professional; the requirement has always been to be professional. There's a really big difference between those two.

We've all seen questions about home systems that were nonetheless very good questions, and usually someone friendly edits out the home bit before it can attract too many drive-by VTCs, and that's a good thing. We've also all seen questions by some poor sod on whom the devops hat had just landed at work, which boiled down to "help, how do I do this incredibly basic task". The former isn't by a professional, and the latter is; nevertheless, the former question is a professional one, and the latter isn't.

But that incredibly basic task is definitely "about managing information technology systems", so by your new definition, it's on-topic.

I strenuously object to this change. I have no interest whatsoever in helping yet another person who's done no research on their own outside the site, who can't be bothered even to search SF thoroughly before posting, and who when given copious pointers to the issue nevertheless wants to be spoon-fed a step-by-step guide tailored to them. Since the site itself refers to them as help vampires, I don't think I'm alone in not wanting to help them.

At the moment, the non-professional close reason is the only one left that definitely rules out questions like that. I think after the mod elections we're all well aware that the SE powers-that-be want to effect a sea change in what SF is for, and how it accomplishes it, but I have no interest in being part of that change.

I want to help fellow sysadmins. That's why I'm here. I don't care whether they're getting paid to do the task that's currently causing them problems. I do care whether they approach that task with a professional mindset and skillset. If you take away my sole remaining tool for weeding out the myriad questions that don't meet that criterion, I will no longer be able to do that.

This said, if there were to be general agreement about the nature of the professionalism we're looking for, I'd be open to an improvement in the language we use, to clarify (rather than remove) that distinction.

Answer 2

What about development?

That is currently excluded together with the home environment, but that exclusions is omitted in your draft. Setting up development environments is explicitly on-topic in Stack Overflow and has been off-topic on ServerFault. But...

There is the DevOps trend that works well for start-ups and more and more enterprises think that is therefore also a suitable model for them.

I think we had that overlap with SO covered our focus on operations and production systems requirements that were in previous versions of site scope/guidelines. That made relevant questions for system administrators supporting a DevOps infrastrcuture on-topic. But those are also no longer there.

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• working with services hosting or enabling your information technology

I think that is lacking the requirement for having administrative control, we expect people to have access to both configuration settings and the ability to change them if required.

If you want to keep it simple but have a generic include of "such-and-such as-a-service" use the overhyped cloud terminology.

• managing your organisations IT cloud services

Answer 3

I'm not opposed to changing the help center text (I'm the idiot who suggested doing it last time, and frankly I still don't think it's very good), but I have some issues with your proposal as it stands.

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Professional Capacity

We have pretty clearly defined what we mean by "in a professional capacity". It's meant to exclude bad questions from developers who don't want to talk to their sysadmin , as well as from people who are cowboying it in the "kinda the sysadmin but no clue what I'm doing really" crowd.
I don't feel that kind of "Fix it for me, but don't make me understand the How or Why behind the answer" question is in scope for this site, and the people asking them are certainly not MY target audience when I ask or answer questions here.

Your language above does not preserve that audience narrowing.
If you can come up with language that does (or a good reason why we should be answering questions from those groups) I'd be willing to give this more consideration, but right now I'm opposed to removing the "professional" requirement.

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Stuff-as-a-Service

I believe Stuff-as-a-Service is already in-scope with the existing Help Center text.

Including "working with services hosting or enabling your information technology" opens us up to "My Squarespace site is borked. That's my company's website. HALP!!" questions.

If you can come up with narrower scoping that makes it more clear that we don't want the questions that should be going to vendor support this could be added, but I think it's superfluous since Stuff-as-a-Service in a professional capacity is already in-scope.

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Licensing, Legal, Circumvention, and Unauthorized Use/Misuse

These all need to be included as explicitly off-topic.
They need to be explicitly listed as off topic because people keep asking these questions even though they are explicitly listed as off topic.

Legal advice needs to be excluded because we are not here to give you legal advice. We are not lawyers. We may mention a legal requirement or regulation if it's applicable to a question but we should not be answering questions about "Is doing X legal under law Y?" - People still ask us that though.

Circumvention needs to be excluded because we are not here to teach you how to get around your system administrator's policy. We ARE the bloody system administrators, and we'd be pissed if someone tried to circumvent OUR policies. (I would agree to mentioning this in the "unauthorized use/misuse" line though - it logically belongs there.)

Answer 4

I'm very skeptical of this change. "Managing informaton technology systems" could include a newbie volunteer who is trying to set up a mailing list for a student club on Go Daddy hosting. The question could be as "We're looking for feature X, which seems to be missing. How can we work around it without paying for a more expensive service?" Not very professional, but from the point of view of that amateur organization, it is their information technology system. And it is on a server, not home equipment.

This change will make it harder than ever before to cultivate a collection of good quality questions. In fact, I would argue that it is quite the opposite of a follow-up to Server Fault needs professional-quality questions, not just questions from professionals, which I interpret to mean "Server Fault needs questions from professionals that are also of professional quality."

Answer 5

This bit is too broad:

• working with services hosting or enabling your information technology

We still aren't wanting to accept such things as end-user shared-web-hosting questions. But excluding these in the list of topics is tricky.

I think this is a bit better:

• deployment to and management of third-party provided information technology platforms

This still isn't perfect (and I'd like to hear ideas for improving it further) but the remainder of the proposal is such that I'd rather see it go in quickly and work this out later, than to hold off the whole thing until someone comes up with the perfect wording - which, if meta is any guide, will never happen.

In the end, such questions aren't a very large percentage of those we get, and they could be handled by directing such users to their end-user support channels via a close reason written for that purpose or the "Other" reason, or just migrating them out when warranted.