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It seems that some of the community here is rather hostile to new posters who don't know exactly how "professional" a question has to be in order to be accepted here as a good fit.

For example, this one I just asked. The initial question form made the the mistake of relating it to a "home dev" environment, which upon clarification, was off-topic in and of itself, but the the heart of the question certainly seems like it might be applicable to "professional system administration" and while the answers could be subjective (e.g. "I have never experienced any issues, but have no technical basis for saying this...") the original form of the question wasn't searching for subjective answers.

So -- should there be a list of "off-topic" item examples for tricky questions? Furthermore, since there is no "real issue" at this time - only potential issues in the future - how would this affect the trickiness of the question? How should it be be "explained" that potential problems aren't a good fit for this QA forum?

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    There is already lots of information provided to help people discover our topicality and scope. Like you most people fail to find and or read it. Personally I think we've wasted enough time and other resources pandering to the clueless already.
    – user9517
    Commented Feb 24, 2014 at 18:13
  • Oh and you didn't make a mistake of relating it to a home dev environment, you described the environment correctly.
    – user9517
    Commented Feb 24, 2014 at 18:15
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    Note that on the Tour and help/on-topic pages we link to our definition of a professional capacity. Part of the unspoken expectation of "professionalism" is that folks read these pages. That said, stripping "home" and "Windows 7" from your question leaves something that is reasonably on topic IMO.
    – voretaq7 Mod
    Commented Feb 24, 2014 at 18:40
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    The problem is that people don't understand who SF is for. We are sysadmins... we spend our day holding people's hand. We don't want to do that here again. A lot of people post without trying, without reading - they aren't sysadmins. A sysadmin would probably spend, oh, 2-3 hours searching before asking anything... if not more.
    – ETL
    Commented Feb 26, 2014 at 4:08

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There already is:

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    Suggestions for improving these are of course always welcome (The first one we (mods) can edit pretty much at will. The second we can probably badger the community team into changing if necessary. The third is unlikely to change, but if any of the examples in the slide-outs are particularly awful we can change those...)
    – voretaq7 Mod
    Commented Feb 24, 2014 at 18:25
  • Tanner and @voretaq7 Thank you very much for the responses. Very kind of you both. :-)
    – Anaksunaman
    Commented Feb 24, 2014 at 19:11

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