Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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Any way around this: "Edits must be at least 6 characters; is there something else to improve in this post?"
See the accepted answer on this question: Give user-creation privileges to a user
There's a small mistake (my fault): the .should be *.*. Changing that is only two characters. There's nothing else ...
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How to handle situations where a user needs professional support and you are willing to provide it?
This has happened to me several times already, and I think I'm not the only one.
A (possibly new) user comes by with a question which clearly shows he is way out of his depth and he needs ...
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How do you define "sysadmin related"?
I'm done with Serverfault. When people can't see outside their own little box of what's system admin related they're not worth me wasting my time.
This question/COMMUNITY WIKI is related to OUR ...
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Why does the careers 2.0 site cater to programmers only?
Apparently, I'd need an invitation to create a profile there. That's fine, I've been around stackoverflow, got a bit of score on SF, shouldn't be a problem, right? Moreover, there are career postings ...
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Over-use of Off-Topic Closure
I'm getting more than a little tired of anything that can possibly be asked on some other site being
marked as Off-Topic here. Since when is user account management off topic for SF?
This one, for ...
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Merge the subdomain and subdomains tags
subdomains seems to be a little-used and description-free tag for stuff which subdomain fits well (ie, DNS subdomain-related issues).
I would propose merging subdomains into subdomain.
Edit: OK, it'...
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SF should use the "interesting" home page
As you might be aware, Stack Overflow has a unique home page which tries to display questions which are relevant to the user. This works very well for SO and helps its users sift through the thousands ...
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How are our questions indexed/googlable so fast?
Asked a question earlier for a problem I was having. After a few minutes I went back to searching for a solution, and came across
I don't know much about SEO or web-scraping beyond the basics, but is ...
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Should Server Fault stop accepting questions from unregistered users?
If you've read the front page recently, you're well aware that there's a large percentage of total crap on it. Indeed, more than a third of the questions posted in the last 60 days have been closed or ...
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Server Fault Conference
I’m excited to announce that Server Fault will be hosting a one day educational conference for system administrators and other network operations professionals. This conference will be supported by ...
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Being professional to professionals
My favourite thing about SF is the 'professional' requirement. I think it's unique in that respect, in that I can't think of another technical Q&A site that has both critical mass and such a ...
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2014 Community Moderator Election Results
Server Fault's 4th moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 2 new moderators are:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for ...
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Is it okay to tell users to RTFM?
A large bulk of users with 1 rep ask remedial vague and constantly reoccurring questions, many are not down voted and some are answered. aren't we enablers for laziness? it seems to be acceptable ...
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What posts get deleted, and why?
A fair number of posts get deleted on Server Fault, for a wide variety of reasons and by a diverse set of methods.
Because these posts are, by definition, not visible and not searchable, there tends ...
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Do we need a 2013 Election?
Well, it's January, which is the traditional time to hold a moderator election on Server Fault.
My question is; do you think we need one? I'd like input from everyone - new users, regular users, high ...
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Massive Spam Attacks since couple of days
It seems that
https://serverfault.com/search?q=loan+number
My first page on ServerFault looks like
gets a lot of hits for the same spam type, and I'm already hitting the flag limits what could be ...
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The never ending flood of "what kind of server do I need for X amount of requests per hour"
These kind of questions just keep pouring in, and the same thing happens every time.
The questioneer never gives out enough details to even guess what kind of spec/bandwith he/she needs, the type of ...
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Are we getting out-of-hand with all of the sub-communities?
On Serverfault I saw the question "Invalidate Google Site Validation (Google Webmaster) [migrated]" and was disappointed to see that it redirects me to webmasters.stackexchange. (I was expecting the ...
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How do high-reputation SF users solve their own problems?
I have viewed some profiles of SF users who have high reputations. One thing I have noticed that they have asked only a few questions. Some Profile links are given below:
Evan Anderson
Iain
MadHatter
...
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How many moderators do we need?
The moderator election states that there are two positions open. With the recent loss of Chopper3, this means that this is a net gain of 1.
There's some discussion with regard to the specific count ...
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What should we do with "coolest server names"
So this question... https://serverfault.com/questions/45734/the-coolest-server-names
It's horribly off topic. It's got a few votes to delete it right now because the community does not want it here (...
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Christmas Hats 2013 Edition!
It's December!
For the past couple of years, many SF'ers have added Santa hats to their Gravatars For Christmas. Feel free to join in, here are the hats we've used in the past:
or
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Pretty low standard for "constructive" comments
It's been a bit quiet in meta.SF the past few days, so I thought it was time to stir the pot. :)
So, I came across this question just now. Reading through the comments (see comment thread screenshot ...
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What to do with questions when the answer is in a man page?
The question that got me wondering about this is here:
Displaying nmap result gradually as results are found
The answer to the question is directly quoted from the nmap man page. I was tempted to ...
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10 years anniversary of Server Fault
Is there any plan for Server Fault's 10th year anniversary? The first question posted on Server Fault on April 30, 2009.
Few months before Stack Overflow celebrated their 10th year Anniversary by ...
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Confused about joining the community (reputation)
I am confused about how to join this community. Here's what I've done so far:
1) I have a problem.
2) I came here for help
3) When I went to ask the question, the instructions told me to ...
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Is this site becoming what it's aspiring to be?
Looking at "What topics can I ask about here?" and comparing to what's actually going on on the site I sometimes wonder if it's what it's supposed to be.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'd think ...
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Serial close-voting?
Is this considered a bad thing? i.e. if someone goes through a specific user's questions and casts a close vote on all (or most) of them?
...'cause I'm pretty sure someone is doing that to "Sandra." ...
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Is "Telephony" (as defined by Area 51 proposal) on topic here?
I need your help and expertise. There is a proposal inching its way through Area 51 to create a separate site for experts in Telephony (PBX/PABX/IP PBX/VoIP/ToIP). Please have a look at this proposal:
...
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Borderlines for GDPR related questions
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) affects everyone working in the field, since it extends even beyond the EU. It's a hot topic, and all kind of myths and claims are developing around it. ...
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Is there anything useful I can do to help with the massive number of spam posts coming in?
It looks like today there's a huge number of spam questions being created. Other than downvoting/flagging, is there anything useful regular users can do? Are there sysadmins that are hopefully looking ...
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canonical tag for canonical questions?
Does it make sense for us to have a canonical tag on non-meta to flag the canonical questions with?
I know that, for me, it would be easier to search for that tag than search for and reference the ...
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Free LOPSA Memberships
Opt-In is now closed. Thanks everyone, We will let the lucky 40 sysadmins know shortly
I'm very happy this has gone over so well, with 50 people opting in. If you didn't get a membership this time ...
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Is useful 'spam', really spam?
While Googling for a utility a few weeks ago, I came up against this question:
Automated method to convert .reg registry file to reg.exe commands
Which was exactly what I was after. However, the ...
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Ways to improve the quality of questions concerning some tags (tag-triggered suggestions?)
I'm quite new here, but I often find myself desiring there was a way to suggest people asking questions to include information probably relevant because of the tags they've used - something like "...
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What are the reasons a question can/should get an upvote or downvote on Serverfault?
The Serverfault community seems to treat questions differently than other SE sites... and there definitely seems to be a "culture" or general understanding on how to treat questions that isn't ...
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How should I review First Posts?
I keep finding myself inside the review queue of First Posts, and then not knowing what to do. If there are grammatical or formatting issues, those are easy - and I edit the question/answer and fix ...
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Are "Help me get [X] to compile!" questions off-topic?
Many of our migrations from Stack Overflow are questions asking for help compiling a particular piece of software (recent example: https://serverfault.com/questions/440591/error-with-...
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What should we do with questions about Vagrant?
We have, at last count, 335 questions tagged vagrant.
As far as I know, for the most part this is a tool used by developers to create developer environments, and not something that is useful in ...
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Community Promotion Ads - 2014 [duplicate]
It's the time of the year again, namely it is December 2013, and so we shall now refresh our Community Promotion Ads for the new year.
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are ...
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Usefulness of [443]?
I just noticed there is a 443 tag. It is used in more than a handful of questions, but I find its name quite poorly chosen.
What to do about it? Rename? Remove?
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How to handle antiquated questions
Is there a method for how to deal with questions that are no longer valid?
In my case, I asked a question which was never resolved, and I am no longer in a position where I could even test an answer ...
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Community Promotion Ads - 2015
The dawn of a new year, 2015, now approaches, or has already approached, either way it means that it is now time to reset our Community Promotion Ads!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community ...
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Canonical: "Help me size my wholly unspecified application" question
We periodically get the "Help me size my wholly unspecified application" questions, like What capacities should have a hosting to support an average of 1000 registered users simultaneously? or Server ...
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Moderation inconsistencies
I flagged this deleted answer (unilaterally deleted by a moderator) for reopening, and gave the explanation "This answer is no worse than any others that have been left intact. It should be reinstated ...
wombleMod
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Proposed change to Server Fault guidelines
Following up on the discussion here, I’d like to propose some changes to our help center guidelines to remove subjective language (particularly the “professional” part) and simplify things a bit, ...
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About bad questions, is answering them a way to encourage them?
I just answered a question about somebody trying to circumvent some network restrictions, I understand that that kind of questions fall under the "system misuse" category, however, I answered because ...
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Homepage spammed
Today, I saw a ton of posts by a ton of different account advertising the NBA. They completly filled the homepage and used up all my flags. What happened and how can this be prevented, since this has ...
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2015 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire
In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as ...
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We need a custom close reason for web hosting control panels
As part of our ongoing cleanup of old (and new) web hosting control panel questions, we need a custom close reason for web hosting control panels which explains the issue, why we are unable to accept ...