<p>Further to the discussion of <a href="http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/4020/list-questions-what-to-do-with-new-ones">list and subjective questions,</a> here's something I was going to ask, but have been trying to figure out how to make it <a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/">"good subjective."</a> (There was also a discussion today on <a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/158877/130540">meta.SO about list questions.</a>)</p> <blockquote> <p>What strategies can be used to minimize problems when you (the SysAdmin) don't have as much control of PCs as you would like?</p> <p>There are a variety of situations where users insist on having more control of their own systems than the sysadmins want them to have. For example:</p> <ul> <li>President or other company bigwig insists on having admin access</li> <li>Developers want admin access to their own PCs</li> <li>Mission-critical apps need elevated privileges, unusual network configuration, or run on non-standard hardware or software</li> <li>and so on...</li> </ul> <p>When faced with an absolute business requirement to support something non-standard and (often) sub-optimal, what strategies can be used to minimize the negative impacts?</p> </blockquote> <p>It seems to me that there are lots of potential good subjective questions that have the same features: </p> <ul> <li>There's no single "correct" or best answer</li> <li>But there probably aren't <em>too many</em> good answers... For my example question, I expect there might be up to a dozen strategies that lots of us would agree are useful.</li> <li>Answers don't have to be specific. The problem with questions that are looking for specific "use tool ABC" recommendations is that tools change over time. But a question asking for techniques or approaches is more likely to be useful in the future. </li> </ul> <p>An obvious problem with this type of question is drawing the line on how many useful answers are likely. Maybe <em>I</em> think there are only a few strategies, but I could be wrong, maybe there are hundreds of useful techniques and the question will be useless because they'll all be muddled together with no useful structure.</p> <p>So: Is my example question "good subjective?" Are questions like it allowed, or are they Not Constructive?</p> <p><a href="http://meta.serverfault.com/a/4012/6177">ANNOYING INLINE EDIT #1:</a> My example question appears to be a duplicate, but what about the general question: is it good subjective to ask for strategies and techniques for dealing with a problem?</p>