What should be done with "Help me do (whatever), I'm a beginner with no idea what to do" questions?

Question

This is an exact dup of a question I asked on meta.SO a year and a half ago, but it didn't get any useful answers back then, and I've noticed a lot of this sort of question lately, so I think it's worth revisiting.

Examples of the type of question I'm talking about:

• How to set up a mail server
• provide virtual drives to users
• I want to make a dropbox clone, help me
• running mailserver on domain (this is the one that prompted the original question

I'm obviously not shy about voting to close these (which I couldn't do when I first asked this) and with the Vote to Close chat room these get closed pretty quickly when necessary.

I think they should be closed because they're almost always overly broad (NARQ), often they're shopping questions (what equipment is the best value - Too Localized), and many times the person asking doesn't seem to have some basic knowledge a SysAdmin should.

Is closing them quickly a fair way to deal with this type of question?

Answer 1

When I see such questions I try to determine, mainly from the way they are asked, whether they are being asked by a complete noob, who really doesn't fit the professional sysadmin/IT person profile, or whether it is being asked by someone who is simply working outside their comfort zone.

For the former case I vote to close. For the second I treat it as a legitimate question.

Answer 2

Is there some kernel of an intrinsically useful beginner sysadmin question in there somewhere?

If there isn't, definitely close them with extreme prejudice! No argument there at all.

If there is, I would try to have a canonical question of that type and close them all as dupes of the canonical "Sysadmin beginner HOWTO: {topicname}" question.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/

Help us build a great library of canonical answers. If you keep seeing the same form of questions, whether it’s mod_rewrite rules on Server Fault, freezing computers on Super User, or how to use regular expressions to parse HTML, write a great, canonical answer, once and for all. Make it community wiki so that as many other people as possible can make it great. Work really hard on writing something that is clear, concise, and understandable by as wide an audience as possible.

Answer 3

This comes back to one of the most common problems for sysadmins: people don't know how to ask good (smart) questions.

Asking smart questions is a skill that is increasingly being lost. I blame Google :-) I have proof of this, and it's not just an online problem.

Asking smart question isn't difficult, but it takes thought and a few seconds of planning.

When you see vague and open-ended questions like the ones you've shown above, just closing the question "with extreme prejudice" ignores the opportunity to help the person learn.

Send them here, instead:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

This is a high-leverage response. It lets them know that you've heard them (which is important!), that you're trying to be helpful, but that they have a little work to do before anyone will be able to help them. It offers them the possibility of learning a useful skill.

"Answer a man's vague question, and you've taught him to ask more vague questions today. Teach him to ask good questions, and you've taught him a valuable skill that helps you both forever."