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Rob Moir
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Serverfault mods on a higher horse than stackoverflow (closing questions)

I have found the serverfault mods to be unnecessarily administrating the closing of questions.

If you look at my history of questions, I have 700 points on stackoverflow, almost exclusively accumulated by asking questions.

It is my experience that the environment of serverfault is unlike any other site of the stackexchange network.

I have had multiple questions closed because the mods apparently:

  1. Don't understand that the question is specifying details implicitly with regards to what it is asking.
  2. Ie, that the question is specific to a particular instance of failure and a person who knows the answer would easily understand the context of the question.

This is inherent to all questions and certainly to questions that are relevant to semi obscure server configuration.

  1. It is quite vexing to be patronized because the mods of this particular exchange seem to think that because they do not immediately understand the context of the question with regards to a particular configuration (or that a beginner should or would), starting from the very basics, that the question does not provide enough context or does not exhibit all of the troubleshooting required to get to that point.
  2. Please stop enforcing arbitrary and excessive requirements to provide an introduction to the question and specify the entire troubleshooting efforts. Most answers to questions and certainly most ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS WITH REGARDS TO ALREADY IMPLEMENTED CONSTRUCTS OF FUNCTIONALITY THAT ARE CONFIGURABLE, are readily apparent to persons skilled in the art.
  3. This exchange should have an even laxer meta with regards context because the questions often deal with well defined constructs of knowledge, ie they are in fact configurable at runtime.

Anyway the point is:

  1. Stop closing questions and wait for a person to come along that knows the answer or wait until a bounty is available or wait until the questioner replies with an answer.
  2. It is very vexing to spend the time writing a question and then getting an inquisition from mods who are not intimately aware of the configuration implying that you have not provided enough information. It is a waste of time and the purpose of the question is await assistance as a convenience.

Frankly, this is infuriating and quite frankly it is abhorrent that serverfault exists separate from stackoverflow because the topics discussed are intimately related to program execution at runtime and would benefit from the faster response times generated by a larger audience.