One important point that a lot of us seem to be completely missing is:

Sysadmins do NOT always have the luxury of choosing the hardware/software!

It certainly is nice to be able to choose the best gear for the job at hand. But that is not always possible.

My situation is that our company is supporting on a professional basis, many small business clients running anything between:

• WRT54GL
• pfSense on an ALIX board
• pfSense on a proper server
• Cisco ASA 5505/5510

If I were to ask "DERP DERP how do i forward port?" on any of these platforms I would expect it to be closed/migrated.

But asking a properly researched and professional question should be treated with the same courtesy as the same question on professional hardware. (Hey, guess what? All those questions were about my home network.)

Also, in the case of properly done home-related questions, sometimes the knowledge gained is applied to a professional situation. (Guess why my home router is a Cisco?)

Of course, then we have the situation such as:

If you're trying to do a port forward on a Belkin Home Router, I don't care if that router is sitting in a 10,000m2 datacenter of a Fortune 50 company - it's off topic.

My 2¢: Are you asking how to do the port forward? Get over to SU. Are you wondering why FTP transfers (and only FTP transfers) suddenly slow down to modem speeds across this port forward? You've got packet captures and strange things are happening? It's probably OK for SF.

Of course, you will get told that the proper solution is to get that POS router out of there. Fair enough. But you may also get a response that shows you exactly why you need something better.

TL;DR

Questions ought to be judged on the merit of the question itself.

Perhaps one of the metrics we ought to be using when there's doubt is: "What are the odds of a professional sysadmin at some point in the future finding this useful?"