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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In SF, when should a response be submitted as a comment and instead of an answer (and vice-versa)?
We were having a discussion about that here.
I feel like I've seen it discussed elsewhere but cannot find it. Perhaps it is different in serverfault than the rest of stackexchange?
My impression was ...
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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Is there a method for how to deal with questions that are no longer valid?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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crossposting: How to deal with question asked twice on other stack exchange sites?
I have noticed a user asking the exact same question both on serverfault and stackoverflow. I'm referring to this question:
stackoverflow: importerror-no-module-named-xhaus-python-module-importing-...
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Which Header tags need beheading?
I was looking for a suitable tag for a question about the email headers my email server creates but while looking I noticed that header-related tags could probably do with a clean-up:
I'm sure there ...
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Is there a way to send a private message to another SF user?
Just for curiousity is there a way to send a private message through any SF facility to another SF user?
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review test: low quality
I am a bit disappointed because I was just told that I had failed a review test. Funny though, I was going to take that one here even before I accepted that one because it was presented to me as the "...
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Can I ask a question with a higher level of abstraction?
Can I ask about more abstract things here? For example, can I ask about why a DNS needs to be public? Or how a accessible public DNS creates a unique destination?
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Possible project/product spamming
User lzap has just posted a rash of answers, some to very old questions, all of which look very similar:
From Automated VM's provisioning:
If you don't mind use Puppet for configuration, then ...
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Do mods now have to write nice emails to spammers?
I just noticed I can no longer quickly suspend spammers, I have to write an email to them (most have invalid emails anyway).
I know this is to appease the few users per year who, when their first 5 ...
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How to attract more professionals?
This topic has been discussed before but I do not believe it to be exhaustive. During the first chat beta, Jeff Atwood and I were discussing potential areas where SF could be marketed to ...
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Someone is removing the history tag. Was that discussed and should the edit be accepted or rejected?
Someone started to remove the history tag from all questions, as I see in the 'Suggested Edits' queue.
I agree that this tag is useless and should be removed. However, I don't find a discussion and ...
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Baby light my fire [operating-system]
What a crap tag - operating-system
Agreed? If so, let's clean it up over the next few days so we can send it to war on the front line against a battalion of heavilly armed enemy soliders so that it ...
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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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Creating a canonical "Help, I'm Getting DDOS-ed!" question?
Another Distributed Denial of Service question (and this one) floated into the review queue. Is there any interest in creating a canonical question and answer for all of D/DOS questions that we see?
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user62491
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What's the etiquette for duplicate questions?
I just answered a question, and then later someone voted it down and noted that it was a duplicate.
Is there a recommended way for an "answerer" to deal with this? i.e. if I find that my answer is ...
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What makes virtual box off topic on server fault?
Background
I'm a fairly green user to server fault, and admittedly to server management. I asked this question regarding an issue with virtualbox which was placed on hold on the basis of
Questions ...
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How to find and clean up bad questions
We've got lots of existing meta posts about how many bad questions there are and how much of a problem they are (or aren't) - that's not what this question is about.
I wanted to collect in one post ...
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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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Users with editing privileges can no longer approve edits
I noticed that a question had been posted with an egregious spelling error in its title. A low-rep user had submitted a proposed edit to correct the spelling error. Had there been no proposed edit 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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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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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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Do SEO, webmaster, etc. questions belong on Server Fault?
Do questions not related directly to system administration, but rather web site administration, SEO, etc. belong on Server Fault?
Return to FAQ Index
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Pictures of text, acceptable or not?
Every now and then I see questions (and the occasional answer) that include pictures of text, often commands and their output and similar.
Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but for clarity these are the ...
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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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Close/reopen vote threshold from 5 to 3
I wanted to ask if the community was interested to have the vote threshold lowered, as they did on StackOverflow (We’re lowering the close/reopen vote threshold from 5 to 3 for good)
I ask as often ...
yagmoth555Mod
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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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Need to either significantly improve a poorly asked+answered old question; or to re-ask (duplicate) it properly
I have basically this question. But that 2012 post doesn't work for multiple reasons:
The OP has forgotten to add good reasons legitimising his request. That lead to the usual avalanche of downvotes ...
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Should I edit my old unanswered question or start a new one?
I have posted a question four months ago which could not be answered because of missing information on my side. I have now collected additional data (network monitoring diagrams that prove the problem)...
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Binaries: where to host them?
After seeing this question exposing a particulary bad choice for a file hoster to place a PCAP dump on, I wondered what the current options are. As I see it, the hosting service needs to be
easily ...
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Editing an answer by adding significant new content?
I have seen a number of edits on the review screens that are adding a significant amount of new content, items which can and (imho) should be free standing answers to given questions in and of ...
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What is the scope of what docker questions are on topic here?
This question briefly touches on this subject: Are questions on Docker suitable for ServerFault?
But none of the answers really address the general question comprehensively about what types of ...
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Remove the messages tag
I recently stumbled across the mess that is the messages tag.
It has no followers, which should probably be the main reason for burning a bad tag, as nobody is currently using it to track incoming ...
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Burninate [repair]?
repair seems like a meta tag to me (repair what? the RAIDs? the LAMPs? TomTom's phone?). Should it be killed, and if so, how?
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Is ServerFault becoming more popular?
I'm recently seeing more questions from ServerFault SE people with lower reputation numbers meaning they are new users.
Does this mean that the ServerFault SE is finally catching on out there in ...
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Colasoft "Spammers"
I have noticed a couple of people on SF that are "spamming" for a company called colasoft. If this was traditional one-liner spam I would be flagging it and moving on with my life.
However there is ...
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Do we really need a [custom] tag?
I just stumbled over the tag custom. It currently has 41 questions, which have little in common. Some could be retagged to customization, when the goal of the question is to actually customize ...
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Happy sysadmin day 2013
Happy sysadmin day to all.
Friday, July 26, 2013, is the 14th annual System Administrator
Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System
Administrator something that ...
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FAQ Rewrite edit round 1
Since the FAQ as-written was not accepted, we get to have an edit round.
The below is a grammar/spelling/punctuation checked version of the FAQ.
The edit process:
Proposed edits will be submitted ...
sysadmin1138Mod
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Cleanup duplicate tags: different by hyphenation and pluralization
Inspired by bad-tag-cleanup project by our awesome mod, here I suggest the idea to cleanup duplicate tags:
Different by one or hyphen, for example port-forwarding vs portforwarding and mod-security ...
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FAQ Rewrite - Round 3
The Words and links below have been incorporated into the FAQ
The proposed FAQ has been officially rejected by the power that be. They had an interesting choice of words for the previous edit. The ...
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Stack Overflow Worldwide Meetups 2012
Can members from other technology related stackexchange sites attend Stack Overflow Worldwide Meetups 2012 ?
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Are questions about legacy products inherently off-topic on Server Fault?
A simple yes or no question:
Are questions about legacy products inherently off-topic?
For instance we regularly get new questions about windows-server-2003 which ran out of extended support in ...
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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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Does copy editing Unicode punctuation into posts contribute value?
This isn't specific to SF, but it came up recently and it's worth a brief touch point. Recently in the review queue, I stumbled upon the following edit:
Before:
How do you troubleshoot Apache ...
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What to do with an accepted answer which is plainly wrong?
Inspired by this question and this one.
In the first question, the accepted and most upvoted answer is wrong and misleading, but it looks like it has been around for a while, it somewhat works (...
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Chat - a plea for moderation
I’ve been a member of the SF chat room for quite some time. Whilst it was never the most learned place to be, at one time it was at least safe for work. Right now it’s an open to google sewer where ...
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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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Sure, we like the IDEA of voting, but we are poor in our actions
Referencing kce's Is ServerFault doomed? Not if we all vote more! where it was upvoted 77 times, with plenty of positive discussion, it is apparent that at least in concept the ServerFault community ...
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Should we modify the FAQ to include policy subversion as explicitly Off Topic?
Based on some of the comments here I went and looked at the FAQ again. We've always, as far as I can remember, closed policy subversion questions as Off Topic.
The question that brought this up is ...
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