There has been some disquiet and discussion recently about the number of poor inbound migrations to Serverfault.
One suggestion is that our subtitle
Q&A for system administrators and desktop support professionals
doesn't convey the scope of serverfault well.
How can we improve the subtitle that is seen on the close->Off Topic dialogue to better convey the scope of Serverfault ?
Serious answer:
Q&A for professional system & network administrators
Not as serious, but gets the point across:
...not a dumping ground for SO questions
After reading more on the background of where this question came from, I don't think any amount of subtitle change is going to prevent bad questions from landing on SF. Using this bad question as an example (referenced in this meta question), a user on SO would identify this as something someone on SF would do, but not knowing how to do it themselves on SO, they throw it to us to help the poster out. We close it because it is missing a ton of critical info and is far too generic a question for us to answer.
How would we help the SO user identify this as a bad question? The short answer is we can't. Since they don't have the same knowledgebase as us, they will never be able to fully evaluate a question before migrating it to us. Since they don't know how to answer the question themselves, they know that somebody on SF would be able to do this general task, and they don't know exactly what info is missing from the question (in this case almost everything), they would kick it to us to work with the user and figure it out.
In a normal workplace setting this would work since we could talk directly to the user and figure out the missing info in a relatively short amount of time. In a SF format this does not work due to the fact that the amount of missing info far surpasses the amount of time/effort involved in extracting it from the user in the SF format of comment, response comment, edit question, repeat.
Possible resolutions:
A shorter one
Expert answers for professionals managing IT systems in the workplace
A slight revision that I believe comes closer to where we want it to be:
Q&A for Information Technology Professionals needing expert answers related to managing computer systems in a professional setting.
Substitute "setting" for "capacity", which I believe helps convey the not in the home caveat we have in the FAQ.
Slight tweak
Expert Q&A for IT Professionals on managing computer systems and networks in a professional setting.
Frankly, I still prefer the suggestion that we're just removed from the migration options at stack overflow.
If we're going to change it (and I kind of have to agree with @Iain here; it's not going to make a difference because they'd have to read it in the first place), I think we ought to change it to the line in the FAQ we keep directing people to:
for Information Technology Professionals needing expert answers related to managing computer systems in a professional capacity.
The current subtitle reads,
Q&A for system administrators and desktop support professionals
It should read,
Answers for system administrators and desktop support professionals
Very little modification. A removal not an addition. Fulminates what is already inside the current subtitle.
This wouldn't be a change for sake of change alone, as 'Q&A', though very topical to the site and community, is not a regular word.
Compare:
Stack Exchange
expert answers to your questions (on site)
Free, Community-Powered Q&A (in Google search results)
A little behind on my meta reading..
Q&A for professional workplace system administration
"From IT experts to IT experts".
