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Possible Duplicate:
How do we grow the Server Fault and Super User communities?

This discussion illustrated some of the issues. Here are my thoughts on SF's problems:

  1. There aren't enough experienced admins contributing. I don't think SF has reached a critical mass yet.

  2. There's a need for some meta about SF, but meta.stackoverflow isn't working well for it. There aren't many of the higher-rep SF'ers here, and I don't think they're likely to come here. I think most people who are active on SF like the way the site works so meta about details of how the sites operate isn't very interesting and doesn't draw admins over here.

  3. When you ask a question, one of the hints on the side is: "We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed." That just doesn't work well for a lot of issues sysadmins deal with. While it's certainly up to Joel/Jeff to decide what sort of site they want, I think if you rule out discussion questions, it makes it less interesting. I'd like SF to be a place where I could go (and I can suggest other people go) to get answers to all sorts of sysadmin questions, not just ones that have clear-cut, step-by-step answers.

  4. I haven't thought about this one much, but it might help if there were a way to quickly filter the 0 votes/0 answers/minimal views questions. I think a lot of these are the "barely sysadmin" questions that people want to ignore.

EDIT: Fine, this question duplicates some of the content of that other question, but it's hardly an exact duplicate. The "problems" with SF that might be limiting its popularity with sysadmins are unlikely to be the same as with SU,

If anything, closing this supports my point #2 that a separate discussion of how SF could be made more vibrant makes sense.

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  • This sounds like a duplicate of meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26689/…
    – Kyle Cronin
    Nov 17, 2009 at 18:40
  • I agree with Kyle. That was my first thought.
    – Troggy
    Nov 17, 2009 at 18:46
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    This is another example of why discussions should not be marked as duplicate. Instead of re-approaching the problem, the fresh interest is redirected to a dead question.
    – Andomar
    Nov 17, 2009 at 19:15
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    @Andomar: I would agree with you in some cases. But in this one, that question is only 2/3 weeks old and was posted by Mr. Jeff Atwood himself.
    – Troggy
    Nov 17, 2009 at 19:38
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    FWIW, this could easily be four separate questions / suggestions. And not all of them would be duplicates... but combined together under this heading, they kinda have to be.
    – Shog9
    Nov 17, 2009 at 19:47
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it was written back when it was just StackOverflow/ServerFault/SuperUser and there was no SF-specific meta. The state of ServerFault has changed substantially sindcethen and most of the issues this question refers to are no longer relevant. Nov 22, 2015 at 22:13

1 Answer 1

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Regarding nr. 4 that would cause problems with new questions, since they all meet your condition.

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