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Someone quite new popped up on 30th December on SF and since then has posted 12 new questions in the last 9 hours, 25 in the last day and 30 in the last 6 days since the 30th.

Many if not all of these questions are badly written and/or have answers readily available either via google/old-SF-q's or vmware.com's top level pages.

Am I being a miserable old git or is this user treating the place like twitter - what's your thoughts and what can/should be done?

p.s. I have been answering their questions, but it's like having a toddler again ;)

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  • 7
    Hover your mouse over the downvote button. Wait till the tooltip pops up. Read it. What do you think now, is the best thing to do?
    – Ladybug Killer
    Commented Jan 5, 2010 at 18:00
  • 4
    A link to the user would be helpful.
    – Diago
    Commented Jan 5, 2010 at 18:02
  • I kind of didn't want this to be about this particular user in a way, more about their behaviour but if you want it it's serverfault.com/users/23439/toretrygg
    – Chopper3
    Commented Jan 5, 2010 at 18:40
  • oh him ... although his questions sound me to me like asking us to do his job in it's entirety. Namely researching a new product. I don't mind helping, but I don't get paid to do your job.
    – Zypher
    Commented Jan 5, 2010 at 22:56
  • 6
    I really like him -- he's helping me get my Electorate badge (by downvoting all his inane and repetitive questions).
    – Unknown Yahoo
    Commented Jan 6, 2010 at 0:50
  • hahaha - funniest post of the day :)
    – Chopper3
    Commented Jan 6, 2010 at 9:44
  • Well, at least he's accepting answers!
    – Farseeker
    Commented Jan 29, 2010 at 3:16
  • @Zypher: sure you are. You're being paid in reputation points.
    – Andrew Grimm
    Commented Jan 30, 2010 at 10:38
  • git certainly is miserable and old, but at least very useful.
    – Krista K
    Commented Sep 9, 2014 at 19:36

3 Answers 3

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Many if not all of these questions are badly written and/or have answers readily available either via google/old-SF-q's or vmware.com's top level pages.

Badly written question is always a problem, however just because the answer is readily available does not mean it shouldn't be on SF. The Goal of the trilogy is to be the Google home page, and a canonical repository of information from all over. Therefore having the answers on SF will add value, if VMWare for example decides to remove documents, which they have done in the past.

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Not sure if I should add this as another question but there is now a rash of new users on SF posting VMware related questions that are direct lifts of questions from various VMware Communities Forums. Some are reasonable questions but some ( like this one ) could only make sense in the support forum where they originated from. Many of the questions asked by the user referred to by Chopper3 followed the same pattern.

This doesn't appear to be an attempt to game the reputation system, and there's no obvious Spam angle that I can see but it is very irritating and I don't think that it is healthy for SF to have content that is clearly lifted from other sites without any acknowledgement. I'm happily down-voting the ones I recognize and have started to flag them but I also don't want to send a torrent of junk at the moderators if this is something that I'm alone in thinking needs to be cleaned up.

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  • Why not rather edit the question and add the acknowledgement. It makes it easier then hitting the user for reputation when they are meeting the goal of the SF site?
    – Diago
    Commented Jan 29, 2010 at 5:16
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I'm bumping this up instead of writing a new question.

We have a person posting only homework-related questions wich are vague, obsolete or simply not a real question (this is the same dude who started the Classfull-IP-adressing debate that's currently going on). Take a look at his (https://serverfault.com/users/44270/zia-ur-rahman) questions, and you'll see the pattern quite clearly.

Is there a way for moderators or admins to block a user for a given number of days - so that they'll hopefully understand that we have rules that everyone should follow?

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  • Personally I suspect it is more of a language barrier issue for him. Asking questions about homework is not directly wrong. The way he asks most of his questions doesn't seem to me like he is looking for the direct answer to an assignment. Many of them seem more like he is looking for clarification on some topic. Unfortunately because they are badly written it is difficult to be sure. I think many of his questions would be fine with a little editing
    – Zoredache
    Commented Aug 2, 2010 at 15:59
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    He has stated several times that his questions are about something he recently learned in class/sessions. From the ServerFault FAQ: "Server Fault is for system administrators and IT professionals, people who manage or maintain computers in a professional capacity"
    – pauska
    Commented Aug 2, 2010 at 16:14
  • I think the semi-repetitive nature of his questions suggests they're short-essay homework questions; plus many later questions were already answered in earlier question's answers.
    – Chris S
    Commented Aug 2, 2010 at 20:20

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