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.
1,480
questions
11
votes
2
answers
222
views
Line noise check, RE: our topic matter
Yes, this is an actual thing that I'm having to post.
Reading a number of the recent opinion wars on meta, I really feel like it should be necessary to complete the following mental checklist before ...
- 32.2k
11
votes
1
answer
188
views
Should we edit posts with foul language?
I came across a question today that included some mild profanity. I'm not sure if I've come across swearing in questions before, but this is the first time it has bothered me.
Should we edit posts to ...
- 13.3k
11
votes
1
answer
230
views
Should I write an answer and have it closed immediately as duplicate as an effort to provide more access points?
I read a question about systemd. The question is good, the answers are good.
When reading it, I realized that I had a similar question, but phrased differently. The original question is
modify ...
- 3,517
11
votes
1
answer
224
views
Is there a voice chat version of the Server Fault 'Comms Room'?
Is there a voice chat version of the Server Fault 'Comms Room'?
Perhaps using the TeamSpeak 3 protocol?
- 101k
11
votes
1
answer
817
views
2013 Community Moderator Election
The 2013 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks,...
11
votes
1
answer
282
views
Editing posts to change bare URLs to meaningful link text
I often edit posts (by other people) to change links from something like this1:
I'm ne to lxc, but have 2 instances now happily using these instructions:
http://blog.foaa.de/2010/05/lxc-on-debian-...
- 30.4k
11
votes
2
answers
578
views
At what point do bounty questions become consulting or off-topic?
Not to pick on a specific question but with this question it seems that it has become more of a running dialog, akin to something a consultant and an organization would have when troubleshooting an ...
- 6,069
11
votes
3
answers
514
views
We have three load/capacity/planning questions
Can you help me with my capacity planning?
How do you do load testing and capacity planning for web sites?
How do you do load testing and capacity planning for databases?
I think that they all cover ...
- 68.6k
11
votes
3
answers
124
views
Can we have a place for "definitive" questions
There are a number of questions and topics that are now regularly closed as dupes of some generally accepted definitive question. As an example, new licensing question get closed pretty quickly as ...
- 27.4k
11
votes
2
answers
110
views
Question migration statistics and a plea
Through the power of 10K tools, I bring you statistics:
Outbound Migrations last 7 days
Total Closed Ignored
SU 19 1 9
SO 2 0 1
Web 1 0 0
...
sysadmin1138Mod
- 132k
11
votes
1
answer
131
views
What a mess [windows] is. Amirite?
I'm currently going through windows closed:0 answers:0 and it's a cesspool.
I'm answering what unloved, but salvageable questions that I can find, but I'm dumping a lot of bad questions in VTC. If ...
- 101k
11
votes
1
answer
177
views
Do we need a canonical answer about ENOSPC?
Searching for No space left on device finds 159 questions, and I didn't find any canonical among them. Do we need a canonical Q/A for that?
So far theses four reasons has covered all of the out of ...
- 30.1k
11
votes
2
answers
703
views
hardware-selection needs to die
The tag hardware-selection is littered with shopping questions and nothing else. It should die a painful death. A very, very painful death.
- 101k
11
votes
1
answer
151
views
Reducing new users asking off topic questions
With reference to the proposed FAQ changes, I notice that more subjects have been added to the off topic section.
As we know, many new users never read the FAQ, this is more than apparent by some of ...
- 7,578
11
votes
1
answer
57
views
Clarification needed on 2012 Election Page
From the election page:
There will be a town hall chat with the candidates on Monday at 21:00
UTC / 4pm EST.
Since the town hall chat already happened, this should either just be deleted or ...
- 109k
11
votes
0
answers
70
views
Merge 500 and 500-error and rename
I see that we have a http-status-code-403 tag. It is quite clear what 403 is referring to in that tag name.
We do not have a http-status-code-500 tag. Instead we have 500 and 500-error, which are ...
- 30.1k
10
votes
5
answers
470
views
What can we do to fix the "Reasonable management practices" close reason?
I don't like it!
Let's make it better, because it's weak.
What questions are being closed right now with it where it's not conveying what we want it to?
Are they "you're on the wrong site", "you're ...
- 114k
10
votes
6
answers
557
views
New "Mainframes" Proposal — PASSED
Update:
Thank you for your insight and feedback.
The “Mainframes” proposal has been cleared to continue.
Update as of the end of 2018: The proposal never got enough interest and has now been deleted. ...
- 788
10
votes
5
answers
233
views
How to get StackOverflow moderators to put hosting questions on Webmasters instead
StackOverflow moderators keep migrating "which hosting company should I use" type questions here, and they usually get voted down. Pro Webmasters seems like a more suitable place for them to get ...
- 9,542
10
votes
2
answers
318
views
Vote: Do we want code highlighting?
Currently, code highlighting is turned off (see balpha's comment here). It is possible to turn it on, if we want so.
I think this would be nice to have, maybe on a per-tag basis, but turning it on is ...
- 17.8k
10
votes
10
answers
599
views
Community Promotion Ads - 2017
It is a bit late into this new year, being that we're already in the second month, but we are now cycling the Community Promotion Ads for 2017!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion ...
- 101
10
votes
6
answers
320
views
Are "Find [some software product] for me" questions off-topic?
So as I slug my way through /review/close and /review/first-posts I'm finding an alarming number of what I'm calling "Serverfault is a search engine" posts -- people asking us to find software for ...
- 79.6k
10
votes
2
answers
917
views
Question about Migrated post that was closed
I am a moderator at Drupal answers, and migrated this question to SF a few days ago. I migrated it because it didn't really have anything to do with Drupal or Drupal configuration. It is essentially ...
- 190
10
votes
3
answers
140
views
Should you accept the first correct response or the one with the most detail
I just recently posted a question where I quickly received two correct responses. The first was posted a few minutes after I asked my question, and the second about four minutes later.
The first ...
- 3,923
10
votes
3
answers
265
views
Server Fault Moderator Cards
We recently printed some business cards for our Stack Exchange employees and they turned out great.
It got us thinking: our sites' moderators have been working hard to keep our sites high quality for ...
- 131
10
votes
2
answers
397
views
Is it acceptable to heavily edit my closed question?
My question was closed as not constructive, despite having some pretty decent answers. After some thought I can more or less see what was wrong with it, and I'd like to make it into something useful. ...
- 347
10
votes
10
answers
455
views
Ethical Questions About Hackers, Cheaters, and Lusers
Sometimes the questions asked here are related to the following three categories ...
Hackers
Yes, yes, I understand there's a fine line between a competent (grey hat) hacker and a sysadmin. But I ...
10
votes
1
answer
239
views
Where do I ask odd systemd questions?
I have not found exact duplicates for
How do symlinks work in systemd unit files (and when/why wont they)?
Specifically: How to inherit settings from a systemd unit to a newly created template?
but ...
- 8,095
10
votes
1
answer
219
views
Is an answer that just says "use commercial product X" spam?
If a user posts an answer that just says "use commercial product X", is it spam?
See for example this answer. It looked spammy to me, so I flagged it, but the flag was declined. I'm sure there's ...
- 8,711
10
votes
5
answers
1k
views
Handling illegal/immoral questions and answers
SF is for professionals and I think we'd all agree that part of being professional is to act within our various laws and also within a general moral code when doing our jobs.
Every now and then I see ...
- 101k
10
votes
5
answers
1k
views
Class-based IP routing and other obsolete questions
Question related to Classful IP Addressing
I cannot believe that I'm still seeing questions about how to manage class-based routing coming in to ServerFault:
Changing subnet-mask of class-c network ...
- 68.6k
10
votes
1
answer
83
views
Clean up [change] tag?
Is there any specific meaning to the change tag? There is no tag wiki, and I don't see that the 33 questions that currently carry that tag have much of anything in common. There are questions about ...
- 4,741
10
votes
7
answers
168
views
What is our policy on "legacy" off-topic questions?
ServerFault contains numerous questions, some dating back 2+ years, that were on-topic when posted but have become off-topic due to changes in our standards for acceptable questions. This is ...
- 14.2k
10
votes
2
answers
279
views
Can we have better messaging for handling Web Hosting Control Panel questions?
In the comments for this meta question we noticed that the messaging around closing Web Hosting Control Panel questions is outdated. The current text is:
Questions involving web hosting control ...
- 3,744
10
votes
2
answers
211
views
"Leave open" votes
In the close votes review queue we are able to select "leave open". What does that really do? Does it counter one of the close votes or is it just a "feel good" option? If it actually does something ...
- 27.4k
10
votes
4
answers
817
views
Cleaning house, really old, unloved questions
Inspired by a post on M.SU by studiohack, I'd like your thoughts on going through and cleaning up some of our old, unloved questions. I've taken a first pass at coming up with an SQL query (...
sysadmin1138Mod
- 132k
10
votes
2
answers
235
views
Clarifying the "shopping question" close reason
Our custom close reason for shopping questions is confusing.
It currently reads:
Questions seeking product, service, or learning material recommendations are off-topic because they tend to become ...
- 241k
10
votes
2
answers
201
views
Are questions about ERP products on-topic here at Serverfault?
I work for a state university as a developer (the sysadmins are in another department, but as I imagine it is everywhere sometimes duties overlap). I often have questions about some of the software ...
- 283
10
votes
3
answers
767
views
Using "not a real question" as a close reason on questions that have answers
I saw this question closed as Not A Real Question (NARQ). What I want to discuss is not this closure in particular, but rather the act of closing a question as NARQ when it already has an answer.
...
- 68.6k
10
votes
2
answers
150
views
Are certain blacklisted words in question titles not just a bit scorched earth and unhelpful?
Recently an operating system's error message included the word "help" in it. I added the error message to the title (always helpful for those perusing questions and most certainly for SERP placement) ...
- 32.5k
10
votes
1
answer
235
views
Storage question. On topic?
I should probably know the answer to this and I'm thinking the answer is no but would the following question be on topic
I have an environment with Live, User Acceptance, staging and development ...
- 3,733
10
votes
2
answers
186
views
Disagree with a declined flag
I flagged this answer as NAA.
The reasoning behind it being that it is clearly an attempted comment on the answer right below it.
This flag has since been rejected for flags should not be used to ...
- 5,587
10
votes
1
answer
277
views
What does "First rollback" mean for the cleanup badge?
I could not find a help file on this: What does "First rollback" mean for the cleanup badge?
- 3,381
10
votes
2
answers
359
views
Can the Vmware tag be deleted ?
The plain vmware tag adds no value as we never get any questions about the company. When it is used it is usually used in error and in place of a product specific tag which would be more useful. This ...
- 115k
10
votes
1
answer
164
views
An expired & re-registered domain causing multiple harmful links across ServerFault
While reading an answer on a canonical question I found out that a domain of our formerly active contributor, MDMarra, has expired and registered by someone else. He has been referencing his blog here ...
- 44.8k
10
votes
2
answers
200
views
Web Hosting Control Panel questions migration
I wanted to share that we got contacted back by Webmasters Stack Exchange for cPanel/WHC question that are off-topic there on ServerFault, that they will gladly accept them.
I just wanted to share it ...
yagmoth555Mod
- 16.5k
10
votes
1
answer
285
views
What Server Fault-specific advice should we give folks asking questions here?
As of a few weeks ago, the "unclear what you're asking" close reason now links to a page in the help center:
The moderators here can edit this page to customize it. So my questions are,
Should they ...
- 420
10
votes
3
answers
379
views
Deleting closed questions with no answers
I don't think there any reason why we shouldn't delete questions like these. They are closed, have no answers and are very unlikely to get reopened - they (largely*) have no value. The
It takes 3 ...
- 115k
10
votes
2
answers
366
views
Why was this question on remotely wiping deleted?
This question was closed and subsequently deleted.
The close reason was given as "unclear what you're asking", but from the comments it seems quite clear that multiple persons had no problem ...
- 30.1k
10
votes
1
answer
305
views
Google Cloud Platform support on Server Fault
For a while now, Google has supported their various Cloud Platform services on Stack Overflow, both in terms of directing developers to the site and in actually answering questions about using these ...
- 420