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I wanted to know if there were any specific technical reasons why large enterprises do not use subdomains to identify their CDNs.

I spent a fair amount of time carefully wording my question and researching various SE sites to try and find one which best suited my question.

I looked at Webmasters, but it seemed more focused on web hosting services, CMSes, and such. I considered posting it on Network Engineering, but that seemed to be more focused on hardware and architecture. After carefully reviewing the tags and history of questions on various sites, I figured Serverfault seemed like the best match to what I was asking.

The question started to get answers, then was summarily closed as off-topic, with a stupid default suggestion that I ask it on Stackexchange or Superuser, (which I of course ignored.)

Why is this off-topic, where would it be on-topic, and why is the boilerplate reason given for closing it so useless?

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  • Hi, I didnt close it, but it seem opinion based to me, but your edit add some context. For the usage itself I don’t know, but I would guess it’s because the cdn is often a thirdpart and you would not want to deleguate your own dns zone to a thirdpart as often the cdn is independant of the main site. As such we might never know the why for facebook or other brand the why they choosed that way. (the why it can be tagged opinion based for me)
    – yagmoth555 Mod
    Commented Jan 4, 2020 at 23:37

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Because it doesn't relate to your management of an IT system in a professional capacity. The question also qualifies for closure under the "opinion-based" (because Internet randos really can't speculate as to why Facebook does what it does) and "too broad" (because there are many possible reasons for why the described configuration might be used) close reasons. I note that the first sentence of both the answers state that they are speculative and broad.

Your statement that the question "started to get answers" is also an indication that it isn't a good fit here. ServerFault deals in questions for which there is an answer, not for which there may be many possible answers. The voting/acceptance systems aren't designed for that situation.

As to why the boilerplate is so useless, it's because boilerplate is practically guaranteed to not be both useful and universal. If it leans towards generic, then it is useless to practically everyone because it can give no actionable guidance, while if it's more specific, it won't address all possible cases of the close reason. We can't have eleventy-bazillion close reasons to choose from -- we only get five customisable off-topic close reasons, and the ones that are available are the ones that have been generally agreed by the community as a whole to suck the least.

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  • can you clarify? I have read the FAQ, and nowhere do I see a requirement that it be about MY IT System in a professional capacity. Using that criterion, any question about any system which I am not personally responsible for is off topic. As it happens, I asked the question because I am considering the possibility of using a CDN in the future, and thinking about how to handle the DNS, but I am not currently actually administering a CDN. Is any theoretical question about a possible future project automatically off topic?
    – barbecue
    Commented Jan 6, 2020 at 14:17
  • Yes, hypothetical questions are off-topic.
    – womble Mod
    Commented Jan 6, 2020 at 20:26
  • Interestingly, I never asked a "hypothetical" question as the term hypothetical question is commonly defined. However it's clear that asking a question of this nature is anathema. So I reiterate the thing nobody has answered. WHERE SHOULD I ASK THIS QUESTION?
    – barbecue
    Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 18:05
  • I swear it's like pulling teeth to get an answer around here.
    – barbecue
    Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 18:06
  • @barbecue The main reason your question was closed is because it did not have a concise and direct answer. The Q&A format doesn't really handle speculatory questions very well, and as a reaction to this the community has decided to not allow these kinds of questions. You can probably find a lot of discussion on the meta about questions like this if you dug around.
    – Reaces
    Commented Jan 15, 2020 at 15:43
  • Would sure be nice if the FAQ mentioned that. Yes, I DID read it carefully, and no it DOES NOT say that. Having to do a bunch of research on meta to find out the rules is asinine. The really amazing thing to me is that the focus is on inappropriate pronoun usage, rather than the obvious active hostility posting here encounters. I'm NOT a newbie, I've been here for years, and I feel unwelcome.
    – barbecue
    Commented Jan 16, 2020 at 4:01

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