We get a LOT of seriously off-topic questions on ServerFault.

This is because new users either can't comprehend the word 'server' in the site name or because they skipped the old, and very clear, FAQ.

So when new users asked eight-word 'questions' about their home routers, recommendations for what was the latest, greatest motherboard or about their fishtank pump we could at least respond with a quick "please read the FAQ".

This is no longer an option - we now have to respond with "please exhaustively read the entire help tree" - which I've not managed to do yet.

I believe the idea behind these changes is to make the place more 'welcoming', well it will be in that new users won't have any obvious actual help and will litter the site with these inappropriate questions.

Worse yet they'll go unanswered and unedited as those users with experience of the site, who put a lot of time into it, will leave or reduce their time on the site because of the lowered signal to noise ratio that's been introduced without any discussion between the site owners and those doing the actual work. I thought this site was supposed to be a community, guess we've just seen that that was never the case.