Server Fault needs professional-quality questions, not just questions from professionals

Question

In the nearly 4 years that I’ve participated on Server Fault, it’s been a community that I’ve been proud to be a part of, and I’ve been able to build my own skill set a lot and help people out at the same time by answering questions. Everyone who’s helped to build this community should be proud of what it’s been able to do. We really have one of the best places on the internet to find answers to real problems that sysadmins face every day, instead of just inscrutable documentation or forum threads filled with crappy cargo cult solutions.

For most of us, the profession of system administration is fundamentally changing: instead of duct-taped together automation scripts, we have a huge ecosystem of configuration management tools; instead of applications running on one server in one data center, we have applications running in distributed data centers or hosted in the “cloud”; instead of just needing to be an expert in an operating system, we need to be able to solve problems with a myriad of OSes, applications, databases, and protocols.

All of these new problems need new solutions, and require sysadmins to reach outside of our comfort zones in lots of new ways. Instead of being able to kick the network issues to the network person, our systems need to be aware of the network, have the network configured in the right way, and even manage the network as software defined networking starts to catch on. Instead of getting an application out of the box that just needs a next-next-done install, we need to be able to understand how best to architect a solution for our specific environment using several different software solutions, and how to integrate those pieces of software.

We need to be able to learn and evolve extremely quickly to keep pace with technology and the state of the craft. Staying up to speed is incredibly difficult in this profession, and getting in the door is getting harder all the time. For me, Server Fault is a great resource for maintaining my own knowledge and improving it - accidentally referring back to a problem I solved years ago because it comes up in a Google search, or having coworkers ask me to help clarify an answer of mine they found while trying to figure out a problem (this happened at my last job), tells me that we’re really helping to advance the field of system administration as a whole.

But, I’m worried that we’ve gotten off track lately. There’s been a drop in participation through contributions - post rate, answers per question, and relatively active users (5+ posts per week) have all been trending downward for a while.

Since June of this year we’ve seen a major jump in traffic - nearly 100% - due to changes to Google’s page ranking, with an accompanying jump in participation through community moderation (mainly close votes and down votes):

...but, crucially, not an increased volume of questions over the same time frame; they’ve essentially stayed flat:

There are a lot of valid arguments on why this is happening, but I think we can all agree that this is not a great direction to be going in.

Server Fault still gets a ton of bad questions, which need to be closed - and there are now fewer regular contributors among whom the load of “taking out the trash” is now spread. As a result, instead of participating through posting and voting on useful questions and answers, many of our most active users, the core of our community, are spending their time on the site looking for questions to downvote and close out of frustration.

We don’t want our best contributors feeling like the most important contribution they can make is to find stuff to get rid of - and more importantly, we want to avoid deterring people from joining the community and participating by being over-protective of what we want the site to look like. Narrow interpretation of the scope with rigid enforcement hasn’t slowed the volume of poor quality questions, but it has given Server Fault a rather hostile and insular reputation and a tendency to give a poor first impression.

I wouldn’t be comfortable telling a sysadmin I just met, especially a beginner or intermediate level one, that they should go try participating on Server Fault without warnings and caveats, and I suspect I’m not alone on that. We need those intermediate level people to be comfortable with dipping a toe into contributing, getting involved, to take the load of answering easy questions off of the veteran users who are tired of the simple stuff. This needs to be a place that’s welcoming of all system administrators, regardless of skill level, in order to accomplish that. Some of our veteran users will reduce or stop their participation, which is expected in any community; we need to have new contributors coming in to keep the community alive.

More eyeballs from Google should be a good thing for Server Fault; it means that this resource we’ve all created is reaching and helping more people, and it means more people who might take an interest in the site (and have expertise that would be useful to have around!) are getting exposed to it. Instead, the we’ve taken a harder line than ever to fight the perceived flood of low quality questions.

Server Fault should be a community that is welcoming of the easy questions. More importantly, it should welcome the kind of people who will be interested in answering those questions, who can can grow their own expertise while at the same time preventing our core contributors from having to deal with every easy question. It should be a community that changes and evolves alongside the practice of system administration, not one that gets stuck on a specific, rigid definition of what a sysadmin does or doesn’t do. It can’t survive and thrive and continue to be a great resource to so many people if we make it a community where only experts are able to ask a good question - after all, our experts are good at answering their own questions too, and rarely need to ask one of the community. Becoming more insular, more selective, more “expert”, is not an option that will lead to a sustainable future for Server Fault.

We should be encouraging questions on subjects like Docker and continuous integration, about trouble with configuration or troubleshooting on specific blank-as-a-service platforms, and about how to architect a server infrastructure for the NoSQL flavor of the month. Instead of trying to reject these questions and the people who ask them, we should push them in the right direction for how to be better at what they’re doing and how to solve their problem in the right way. Getting that knowledge out there, in front of the eyeballs from Google, is how we can really make a difference.

A few months after I started at Stack Exchange, the community team asked me to look at what I would do to try pushing Server Fault in the right direction. What I’ve arrived at is to remove the “professional” criteria from the scope of the site - it’s getting used too aggressively in closing questions, as well as interpreted to limit the set of topics that are accepted here.

Now, before anyone panics..

What I’m about to propose isn’t intended to lower Server Fault’s quality bar, or open the door to everything that belongs on Super User being on-topic here.

I’m asking for questions to be considered on their merits, taking away the close criteria of “infer whether this person has the right job title” because that can’t be what we’re focusing on when we decide if a question fits.

We still want to make it clear that if it’s for someone’s home network, it goes on Super User. And if it’s a weak question that can’t be understood or has no detail, I expect the close-hammer to fall just as fast as before. However, someone having problems with setting up hobby project on a VPS even if they aren’t a sysadmin by day, or a developer trying to work out how to deploy their application successfully to a robust server stack instead of their development machine, are the kind of questions that I want to be in scope for the site now.

This isn’t going to directly address the volume of low quality questions that we’re currently dealing with. What I’m hoping for is a change to the community’s approach to some of those questions: spending time editing the salvageable ones, giving users a push in the right direction instead of closing their question as quickly as possible in an attempt to avoid “broken windows”, or downvoting the question because they think the answer is too obvious.

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.” Over time, my hope is that we attract more intermediate-level contributors that we’re scaring away now who can handle the easy questions so the veterans won’t need to.

Question quality, and making sure contributors aren’t spending their time sifting through questions they aren’t interested in, is something that’s been getting a lot of attention on the Stack Overflow side of things, which can benefit Server Fault as well. Some of those efforts are applied here automatically, like rolling rate limits - we’re also going to test out how well some of the specific optimizations on SO work on SF, like the recommended tab, and see if we can tune them to work well here.

I want for Server Fault to be the great resource to so many people that we all know it can be, and the great community that I’ve known over the last 4 years, and continue to evolve as a resource for everyone in this profession - and I believe that it can do that as a place for everyone working on the kinds of problems that we are, whether they call themselves sysadmins, SREs, devops, or anything else.

My hope is that everyone in the community will join me in giving this a shot.

Answer 1

I'll be the first to admit that I've stepped away from SF for a while. Those reasons are my own, and everyone should be able to step away when they want to.

That said, I've been looking at the site more recently, partly because it's been brought up in team meetings and partly because I miss answering questions and helping people.

This is not the community I have great memories of. This is not even the community that I left. This is now a community full of hate and isolationism. Personally, I was very disheartened to come back and see that state that this community has changed into.

We are not helping to make the current, future, and past generations of system administrators better here. People should not be shouted down because they are perceived to be not good enough. New people to our profession should be welcomed with open arms, taken under our wings and taught how to become a good admin in today world. We all had basic questions when we where young admins and there were people who guided us. Now that we are sitting at or near the top of the mountain, all we are telling the people who are not as skilled as us is you are not good enough, you are dumb, go figure it out for yourself.

For me, answering questions here, and on other forums in the past has been a way for me to give back to the community that made me the Admin I am today. To help mold the future so that our profession can come out of the dark basement, can be better than what we are now.

If we continue to work the way that we have then all we are doing is killing this site, and driving the sysadmins of the future somewhere else. And I believe the SE network is the best place to get amazing answers to your questions (not just because I work here, I believed that before I was hired).

Answer 2

We seem to do this every so often. What we have is a long tail problem. Here, have a made-up graph:

Surly target market http://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2012/09/08/surly-target-market.png

Years of experience is not as good of a metric as it used to be, especially as more and more sysadmin types are code-types who are trying to glue/automate systems together through frameworks like puppet, and are getting their answers on StackOverflow (they have more puppet questions than we do, by the way). The career path of such code-focused sysadmins is a different one from those of us on the rack-n-stack side of things so they feel... developery, and their questions get VTCed a lot. Which is bad, since they're the feeder system to the surly target market.

The future of the profession is much more code-focused than it used to be, and chasing away coder-types is a great way to further the decline of the site. Or push us back into the arms of StackOverflow from whence we came. I don't ask questions on SO because I get answers back in deep dev-speak, which I have trouble decoding, and they're their own kind of antagonistic towards n00bs over there. Questions asked here select for an audience who thinks like I do, so the answers are more comprehensible. New automators are coming into the market with software-engineering training so actually get value from SO, unlike me.

The code-like nature of things to come makes it even harder for others to figure out what SF is for. We're more than the Systems Annexe of StackOverflow. Heck, we were given a moat when they took away the ability to migrate SO questions to SF. The fact remains that the surly target market we have right now came of age in a time when things were quite different in the admin space and up-and-comers do not sound like we did back when.

Thoughtful, narrow focused questions that show research and give relevant detail are hard to write. The author needs to have a grasp on the problem that's complete enough for discarded theories (provide proof, please), but not so complete as to know just what the problem is. That's a pretty narrow scope, and is our platonic ideal.

Questions like this one come from the beginner space: https://serverfault.com/questions/646007/how-to-perform-all-sorts-of-administration-tasks-both-locally-and-on-remote-com

Yes, that IS an incomplete understanding of the problem. They know it's possible, and are looking for the lead in how to solve it. This question didn't show research or trial theories.

If they had asked a question on how to configure WinRM to talk to other machines via PowerShell, it might not have been VTCed. That shows they're on the right path, but just need some help with an implementation detail.

Back in 2010 I would have answered a question like that without second thoughts. Today it took less than an hour to go from ask to closed. This is the kind of person that is starting out in systems administration. winrm is another tag with more questions on SO than SF. There is a reason for that.

Answer 3

The greater the number of participants, the lower the quality of the average participant. That's just the law of averages at work. I rarely participate here anymore, because I can't get help for my problems. There comes a point where fake Internet points isn't enough to keep someone around.

I think that many of the most upset people should have stopped participating in Server Fault long ago as part of the normal attrition rate of a community like this, but instead are hanging on to the way things were 5 years ago when there were a small fraction of the page views that there are now. That doesn't help anyone. If you are truly upset at what the community has become and you haven't been able to figure out how to fix it in years then maybe there isn't anything to fix. Maybe that's just how things are now and you should try to accept it.

As an "outsider" now, it seems silly to see people debating the merits of the words "professional" or "off topic." The people on this site that truly care about that type of thing are statistically irrelevant when compared to total page views. So, I see two options:

1. Reduce the barriers to entry. This will likely drive away a few more top users (who maybe should already be gone), but will make it a more welcoming place to random googlers.

2. Greatly increase the barriers to entry by having some type of new user approval process. I don't think that this is realistic, as private communities are not part of Stack Exchange's mission.

I think #1 aligns with Shane's suggestion.

Answer 4

Obligatory preamble as to where this is coming from: I would consider myself an outsider of Server Fault. I'm very young (not legally an adult), and so I'm learning system administration in the age of Puppet and Docker and all that. I would consider myself an intermediate system administrator. This is not so much an answer as a couple of potentially useful observations from my point of view.

A lot of the posts above have been talking about negative feedback, bad quality questions, the effect of influxes of users from Google, etc. But I haven't seen a lot about how to attract new regulars, and that's an important part of turning Server Fault into a healthy community again. The way I see it, Server Fault is now in a position where it has a bootstrapping problem. I'm interested in being a regular on Server Fault, as I genuinely really like system administration, but when I've tried to start answering questions, I can't find any that are within my skill level to answer. I'm not an organization, I'm a hobbyist. I run my home network like a corporate network for the fun and utility of it, but I can't and don't use anything that requires a lot of money. Because of this, any question that is about (e.g., just off the top of my head) HP-UX, Windows, iSCSI, large-scale SANs, etc. is automatically something that I can't answer, because I don't have the equipment and/or licenses.

This is indicative of a larger problem that Shane (I believe) mentioned: Server Fault has no intermediate questions and no tolerance for intermediate questions. The question is, how do we generate an influx of intermediate-level questions that is sustained long enough that a set of intermediate regulars can form? I don't know. Maybe part of the answer is "be nice for a while and see if people come." Maybe it's something else. I genuinely have no idea.

It's very late here - one minute to midnight - so I apologize if I've just rambled on and reiterated things that have already been said, wasting your time, but I don't think I have. I hope this post offers a useful alternate(-ish) perspective.

Answer 5

Shane Madden said:

We still want to make it clear that if it’s for someone’s home network, it goes on Super User. And if it’s a weak question that can’t be understood or has no detail, I expect the close-hammer to fall just as fast as before.

I'm glad Stack Exchange is taking this position :-)

What I’m about to propose isn’t intended to lower Server Fault’s quality bar, or open the door to everything that belongs on Super User being on-topic here.

I’m asking for questions to be considered on their merits, taking away the close criteria of “infer whether this person has the right job title” because that can’t be what we’re focusing on when we decide if a question fits.

Regarding "questions to be considered on their merits"... I agree, and a few weeks ago there was a strangely similar discussion about a guy who insisted that Network Engineering should help him build an ethernet cable for his home office. Aside from the coincidental timing of the drama, I wanted to share a few thoughts... perhaps we agree, but I'm going somewhere with the discussion.

SO has had a long-standing policy about judging questions on their merits, instead of the job description of the person asking. I agree with this policy, however, let's consider some of the differences between common SO topics and SF topics:

• SO: HTML and JavaScript
• SO: Compiled languages: C, C++, C#, Java, go
• SO: Scripted languages: Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, shell

• SF: Unix / Linux system administration
• SF: Windows administration
• SF: Database administration
• SF: Network administration

I see a few notable differences between SO and SF questions:

• On SO, it's quite possible to replicate the OP's problem without hours of labor; particularly since there is an emphasis on creating a minimal, complete, valid example. People might not be terribly good at doing it, but it's at least feasible in many cases.
• On SF, it's quite challenging to expect people to build the same minimal example, because many questions are specific to the OP's work environment. For instance,
  • I can clone someone's git branch and experiment with their code if I need to, but how exactly does one clone their linux server, SAN traffic, hadoop cluster, or network congestion?
  • System administration also has a higher barrier to entry than programming. Even if I was inclined to spend hours building a virtual or physical mock up of an average SF problem, there are non-trivial licensing issues involved with replicating many environments (i.e. Windows, Solaris, HPUX, Juniper, Cisco...). By way of contrast, a lot of software can be written with free / open-source tools available to the masses (gcc, Eclipse, git, scripting languages, etc...).

So, what is my point?

The higher barrier to entry, and complex systems make it all the more important to get good documentation from people asking on SF; however, getting them to figure out how to document something is a chicken and egg problem.

We all say the same thing... the questions largely stink. On another site, I attempted to help people ask good networking questions, but even that (largish) document has not shown itself adequate yet. I'm not sure a self-scored checklist is the right answer; they need targeted feedback from the community.

Rhetorical question: How do you help a clueless person even know the right things to document? Speaking from very limited time moderating another site, it is pulling teeth to get people to put IP addresses and interface names on diagrams. If they simply knew how to document their problem adequately, I argue that at least 30% of them could solve the problem themselves. Yet, after trying for the last year to get good question documentation on a small beta site, I'm concluding that many people simply are not willing to submit to pleading in comments for even the simplest documentation, such as posting their configuration and an adequate topology diagram. NOTE: I have a feature request below that might improve the question feedback process.

My SF Feature Request:

I have a theory, which I hope Stack Exchange could help prove:

My theory: If we give people very specific feedback on what is missing from their question, as well as a complete example of what we expect to see then we stand a chance of getting better questions.

Feature Request: Give every SF question a scorecard, which indicates what is lacking from the question, and a good example of what it might look like. Every person who views the question can vote for whether the person needs to add information to the question.

The score card should look something like this to the OP:

• 54 people graded this question:
  • 30% of reviewers are tired of seeing trivial questions from you (yes, I understand this bullet is controversial)
  • 80% of reviewers are not happy with the current state of the question; 10% of reviewers think the question is adequate. 2% of reviewers think you did a good job asking the question.
• Requests
  • 90% of reviewers think this question needs a good network diagram (include a hyperlink to what we think a good network diagram looks like, including subnets / interface names).
  • 75% of reviewers think you need to add the version of operating system you're asking about (include a hyperlink to how you document the operating system for common operating systems)

The score card should be associated with each revision of the question. After a question is edited, the OP should be asked whether they included what was asked for. If they did, then the score for that element should reset. If they did not, then the score should carry forward. If people consistently lie just to reset the score card, they potentially could be suspended, or loose reputation.

In order to build a decent score card, we need to designate score card tags, such as windows, unix, network, http, etc... The tags would determine which score card is used for the question.

Finally, the score card must render well on mobile devices; most of the time I'm on stack exchange, I'm on my phone.

I realize that this suggestion is really a whole separate discussion itself, and I've hardly done a good job explaining the requirements. The point was to not just to gripe about how much questions suck, but hopefully offer a practical suggestion for improving status quo.

Answer 6

Feel free to try, not that you need my permissions or anything, but I'm pretty sure your proposal addresses the wrong problem.

I don't think that the "not professional" reason gets used as an excuse to clamp down on high quality, but home/development questions. In fact, my experience has been the opposite - the regulars will save high quality questions from that requirement, rather than using the "professional requirement" to slam shut good, quality questions. I have personally edited out "at home" from questions to save a good questions from closing, and I've witnessed other high-rep users do the same thing with similar good, but out-of-scope questions they felt added value to the site, in spite of not being strictly professional. And this is above and beyond what happens more regularly with reopen votes and the close vote review queue.

Given that, I think it would be really helpful if you find some examples of questions that add value, but got slammed shut simply because they're not professional. I really doubt you'll be able to find many. What I see far more often is a bad question, or question about "doing it badly" getting slammed shut for not being professional, the OP saying they are, in fact, a professional, and then being pointed towards the meaning of "professional" meta thread, with butthurt usually ensuing. Of course, butthurt usually ensues anyway, because it's evidently not nice to tell someone why their pile of shit masquerading as a question is a pile of shit, even when done politely and constructively, but that's a bit of a tangent.

I really do think that questions are judged on their merits as it stands now, and the professional close-reason is used as a supplementary close reason most of the time. There isn't really a clear "your question sucks" close reason, but the professional capacity close reason is fairly close, especially if you read the meta thread on what "professional capacity" means in these parts.

The data you cite would be interpreted more accurately if looked at through the lens of drive-by window-lickers becoming more active as the high-quality regulars (and even just anyone with half a clue) becomes less active. It is my opinion that the window-licking horde of crap-flingers are driving off the people who would otherwise be asking quality questions, but I will grant that it's not something I can prove, or offer more than anecdotal evidence for.

In any event, I think that's where the effort needs to be focused. Slow the influx of crap, and hopefully retain more of the regulars we have, or allow new people to grow into that role. (Ways to do that, like stopping unregistered users from asking questions have been suggested and not implemented by SE.) But I don't see us retaining existing members worth a damn, or growing new ones while the front page is full of embarrassing fail. And not just embarrassing fail from a professional IT perspective, but from any perspective. Seriously, right now, all the Server Fault main page does is validate my low opinion of humankind. And having said that, that is why I can't recommend Server Fault to friends and colleagues or co-workers any more. Not because I'm worried that someone will hurt their feelings or close their question, but because I think they'll look at the main page of the site, see the river of shit and lower their opinion of me and my skills accordingly.

Answer 7

I agree that SF should be a site for professional network administration. Even though it is a valuable resource for me, I don't feel it's as good as it should be.

In fact, it's scope is too narrow: Q&A for professional system and network administrators.

I am employed by a small enterprise, I'm responsible of a network with 7 servers at the headquarter, and about 30 shops. I have real and difficult system and network issues to deal with, but I'm not considering myself a professional network administrator, because it takes only a small part in my time schedule. Programming and helpdesk take the big share.

In my opinion, SF should be open for questions about system and network administration in a professional environment.

When I face a problem for which I cannot find the solution online, I often don't feel comfortable to ask here on SF, because the question seems too convoluted. Or I wonder what might be so special in our system setup, that nobody has that problem. Sometimes I also wonder why I don't get an answer to a problem that seems simple : don't others have the same issue ?

To conclude, I think that this proposal goes in the right direction. I hope this site will remain a valuable resource, and that in the future it will open up it's scope and even get more helpful.

Answer 8

We're caught between a rock and a hard place here. Server administration on the professional level requires good communication skills, and the ability to effectively break down (and convey) a problem in a way where others can understand the environment, the intent, and the challenges.

Unfortunately, these same qualities pretty much fly in the face of the nature of the internet and SE in general. This is sad, because I think there is value to what this community wants to accomplish in making its userbase conform to this bar. The value isn't just making it easier on ourselves (the people who answer): it reinforces the problem solving skills that make or break a good system administrator, which are takeaways that can help a person in a broader range of scenarios than the one they're originally asking us about. The language barrier really gets in the way of this unfortunately.

I truly find value in being able to help people get exposure to this kind of problem solving mentality on the internet. The problem is doing so in an effective way. I know I'm not really providing any solutions here, but I think it's worth saying: while it may be inevitable, I will be very sad to see our "professional" qualifier go.

Answer 9

As someone that participates on SF sporadically, the main thing that turns me off about the current environment is seeing a high volume of down voting without explanation (Basing this on what I saw in Oct / Nov, maybe things have improved). Without explanation it's difficult for an intermediate level admin to understand the flaws in their question.

Here's a recent example of high downvotes without explanation: https://serverfault.com/questions/649936/change-documentroot-of-a-subdirectory-in-directadmin (it also isn't closed)

It's not a great question but the person was down-voted and as of now was not given any tips on how to improve the question.

On the other hand, people seem to do a good job closing poor quality questions quickly.

I like the strict quality criteria, because it makes me think harder about my question before I ask. The excessive down-voting I see on other people's questions however; easily creates a negative perception of the site.