I ask a "practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face" and it just gets closed -- and it's been tagged a "discussion" question.

Well, it's a discussion question if you don't know the answer, like this one, but if you knew the answer to this question, you wouldn't discuss it would you? You would just give me an answer, like

"No". "Mark your question as important"

I asked the question last night. I come here in the morning. If there were no answers, I could understand that. If there were requests for clarification I could understand that. I've got a meeting I've got to go to, and users I have to talk to, to try to explain what happened, and the question got closed before there was any chance of reply.

So, as well as my anger, disgust, and dismay, here is a suggestion:

Don't close "discussion" questions until there is a "discussion" reply. 

You may think that a question invites "discussion" answers, but there is a simple, specific, definitive test for that: wait and see what answer it gets.  

If it gets no answer, no loss. If it gets a real answer then you haven't made worthless the entire concept of serverfault. If it gets a "discussion" answer, then you've given me a clear indication of the error of my question.

Responding to some comments left here:

1) http://living.msn.com/life-inspired/miss-manners-advice

2) It's clearly a general problem here: discussion questions are not closed, see any very highly rated or very low rated question: 
http://serverfault.com/questions/473089/can-ping-out-but-not-in, 
http://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-security-auditor-is-an-idiot-how-do-i-give-him-the-information-he-wants)
and non-discussion questions are, so I asked a general question. Since this is Meta, with a specific tag Discussion, I thought a general discussion question was more appropriate than a question about a specific post. (I invite you to respond to the general discussion question. If you think general meta discussions are not appropriate here, I invite you to make a reply to that effect).

3) On a slightly different tack, it is interesting that you want a link to a question: although I haven't spent much time here, I'm old enough to remember that the original idea of stackexchange was that it would NOT be indexed or cross-linked: "Google is the index"
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/search-all-stack-exchange-sites/, and I've been surprised that lifestyle-users want to make it a closed (self-referential) site: I think that's a mistake. But, whatever. That's the natural life cycle of user sites, and if you don't fight against it, it happens.  I'll try harder to conform.