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StackOverflow moderators keep migrating "which hosting company should I use" type questions here, and they usually get voted down. Pro Webmasters seems like a more suitable place for them to get voted down. How to get StackOverflow mods to start using the other StackExchange sites?

In addition, there are more valid questions such as "what should I look for in a web hosting company?" which end up at ServerFault. There are plenty of people here capable of giving good answers, but then that probably goes for any of the StackOverflow sites.

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  • Are you sure it's the moderators and not the general population that is doing the bulk of the moving?
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Feb 2, 2011 at 21:03
  • I don't know how it works? Can I move a question? I though the general population could only flag something for migrating a question, with the moderators making the decision.
    – dunxd
    Commented Feb 3, 2011 at 13:28
  • higher rep members have a voting option. 5 votes and the question gets closed or moved, with no moderator action required. It's all explained in the FAQ.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Feb 7, 2011 at 20:43
  • Ah - ok. But then they are moderators in all but name.
    – dunxd
    Commented Feb 7, 2011 at 21:18

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I personally do not believe these belong on any SE site. They come under the bracket of "Subjective and Argumentative", as you are always going to elicit different responses from different people, and often just attract spam as chopper said.

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    correct, they belong nowhere, they are shopping questions.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Feb 2, 2011 at 10:33
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    In that case, can mods stop just shuffling them around and just close them altogether?
    – dunxd
    Commented Feb 2, 2011 at 10:42
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    My slight confusion though jeff is when someone says something like "I want to buy a dual socket server for running a database on" - for those I'm quite happy to specify models by HP/Dell/IBM/whoever with set processor/mem/disk recommendations - technically that's a shopping question but I feel does fall into what we do - that's my opinion anyway.
    – Chopper3 Mod
    Commented Feb 2, 2011 at 11:25
  • @Chopper3, I think it depends a lot on just how the question is worded. It helps immensely if the OP appears to have done some research on their own and just needs some input to help make a final decision between a few possibilities. Sadly, that's rarely that case.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Feb 2, 2011 at 21:07
  • @John, that's getting back to the questioner's responsibility of due diligence. It's not so much that 'shopping' questions are bad, as wildly open-ended, spam-magnet, no-representation-of-prior-knowledge questions. Which is basically what you're both trying to say I think...
    – Chris S
    Commented Feb 7, 2011 at 22:09
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You are right that they don't belong here on SF. I would go further to say that like other shopping style questions the don't belong on SE at all and should be closed as off-topic.

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A mod on webmasters.se may have just been voted a mod on Server Fault, so I hope that I^H they will be able to help clean up webmasters/non-webmaster questions.

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    Congratulations for increasing your workload Mark. :)
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Feb 2, 2011 at 22:49
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I was just talking to Pauska about this subject on chat - I totally agree that they don't belong on SF (same for SSL cert ones) - they're just spam-bait too. Not sure what to do with them to be honest, if someone edits the FAQ to state we don't do them I'm more than happy to just close them myself - though that might be too harsh.

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Without going into the question of where they should live, you could modify the tag wiki summary for "hosting" so that it asks that they do that.

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  • I don't know how much that will help. I've never read a tag wiki and strongly suspect that people who don't read the FAQ, and therefore post off topic questions, won't read them either.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Mar 18, 2011 at 6:37

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