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It's a downward spiral, at least for me. I used to be very active. I believe I averaged 30k rep per year for the last couple years, but my participation is essentially non-existent now. I've been thinking about this since I saw this post yesterday and wanted to share my story, as it may provide insight and lead to a solution down the road. I got busy in ...

Warning: This is something of a though-stream, so... The visible symptom: Attracting and retaining people who can positively participate in the community, either both asking and answering questions, or at the least providing substantive answers on some kind of "regular" basis. This has been an ongoing issue for the site for a long time now. I'm really not ...

I will chime in & basically say I do not think this is an issue with the quality of posts & interactions here as much as the state of I.T. & developers in general nowadays. Seriously, I am far from the best says admin out there, but I have met developers & other admins out in the market nowadays who somehow have gigs yet their work is jaw ...

One of the guiding principles for 'what site should I migrate this question to' is, 'keep it where it is, unless it'll get much more love somewhere else.' This very question was brought up many times back when the whole Area51 thing started out. In brief, The Powers That Be are not afraid of overlap. In fact, overlap can be good. Overlap builds (multiple) ...

Man I love you guys. Free t-shirts, LOPSA memberships and now business cards (not to mention a very handy 32Gb USB stick). However, I must say, I personally wouldn't have a need for them (same as I had no real need for a LOPSA membership). What I might suggest though is perhaps provide them on-request to anyone who is going to be speaking at a conference ...

After reading all the answers thus far, and initially convincing myself that I had nothing to add, I noticed something that's missing from everyone's analysis thus far. Us. We are missing from our own analysis, particularly when it comes to the signal-to-noise ratio. The crap outnumbers the good stuff. And for sure, there is a problem of too much crap/...

We could re-examine the list of things that we shut down as "not professional", and see whether there is a community of professionals who work with those subjects we could embrace. The datacenter is changing, and if we don't update our definitions, we'll find ourselves shrunk to obscurity.

From my own perspective, the breaking up of SF into a bunch of only semi-related sites has dramatically reduced the value I get from SF, which is reflected in my ever decreasing enthusiasm for it. When I first came to SF it covered all the topics I was interested in from the sysadmin perspective (as well as a whole lot more). Now I'd have to troll a number ...

One thing that you - and everyone else who complains about downvotes - need to keep in mind is that the main purpose of votes is not to give feedback to the person who wrote the post. The main purpose is to tell everyone else who reads the post what the community thinks about it. I keep an eye on a few other SE sites and it's interesting that on ALL of ...

Law of Diminishing Returns I'm still a baby with SE and have been on the sites for around a year or so. I believe what is occurring is the law of diminishing returns. I believe as experience and wisdom is gained the older generation on SE begin to see the questions as "noob" or "amateur" rather than professional. The perspective is ever changing and the ...

I think we are a little quick on the draw to close questions. I spend a lot of time looking at the close queue (I believe I am the 4th most prevalent close vote reviewer at the moment), and when I aggregate our collective requirements (as I observe, not as we intend), I get something like this: No abuse of terminology or use of incorrect or dated ...

Honestly, when I'm out about in the community, the ServerFault t-shirt I got does a good chunk of the outreach portion. Now that some of the SE merchandising is available, that may become less useful. Honestly, there are scant few times a year when something like that'll be useful. My new employers are less reticent about sending me to conferences so the ...

First, SE didn't make the changes, the Moderators did. Second, as Falcon mentioned they're "cleaned up" versions of what the community thought were the most needed close reasons. We had to fit a certain format. I'm sorry you apparently missed that we were taking suggestions for the last month for the new close reasons: New close reasons - Proposals (July ...

Speaking only for myself: I got really busy at work. I think that's just something that's going to happen to everyone from time to time. I also find that unless I spend a certain amount of time on the site, someone else answers the questions I would have answered first. (HopelessN00b, I'm lookin' at you, ha ha.) Anyway. As things calm down I'll try ...

My sentiments pretty much echo Ward's, but this was too long for a comment. If you request honest feedback, the community has a good track record of being receptive to that. However, there is a fine difference between requesting feedback and complaining about it. Typically, StackExchange communities with many low quality questions are painted as being "...

Actually your question is a bit vague and lacks critical detail. Part 2 can be easily found in lots of places and even on Server Fault with a simple search and a bit of rummaging through the results. The first part lacks critical detail. How are you trying to connect from the client to ServerB:3306 via server A presumably? Have you enabled routing on ...

You're not looking at the tag, you're looking at the tag wiki. The Tag Wiki must be created by someone, and is created blank. Your wiki edits (which are awesome, by the way) are edits to the blank wiki. My guess is because this is because when we approve edits to the wikis, it shows a diff between the two versions. And you can't show a diff unless there are ...

I'm an enthusiast for answering questions - I like to be able to contribute to the 'wisdom of the internet' in a positive way. I've answered a few questions on ServerFault, but not as many as I'd have liked. Aside from poor initial questions, the other reason I trip up is because some questions are extremely specific. That's an artifact of the target ...

I have some ideas but you are not going to like them... Please see my bit of amateur anthropology to get an idea of the framework I'm going to construct this around. I really believe that many of this site's issues discussed on Meta are really the byproduct of the lack of consensus between the ServerFault community and the StackOverflow community about the ...

I think SF is too heavy handed on the closes and non-professional complaints. Closing a question because the OS happened to be XP? Yeah, it's not a server OS, and if given a choice I wouldn't run it. But the business side of things rarely gives you such a choice. Hell, we just managed to kill our XP server yesterday. Making an active user justify a ...

tldr; some sub-sites are justified, others are just a pain. I believe so, especially when you consider that revenue is generated via ads, and the more visits to a single SE site the better. I tried to get the good folks over at RPi.SE to see that their questions fit happily inside of a linux SE and a Embedded electronics site such as that proposal I just ...

On the one had, I agree that there are too many overlapping sites, but that's the SE business model, so there's not much that can be done about it. I don't follow Security.SE or Linux or Webmasters, and I'm sure there are some questions on those sites that I'd be interested in, but I don't have time to be active on those sites. OTOH, it doesn't seem to be ...

I agree with SysAdmin1138's post. And to specifically address your concerns: They can post the Question on any site and it should be migrated to the correct site. Perhaps this should be more clear in the Question Asking page; and it should be reinforced to the community to migrate appropriately if it's a decent question (obviously crap should be closed). ...

I think sysadmin1138 and Gilles have this question pretty much nailed down... So I'm just going to address this: Which site should I post to? There's an old blog post on this... Is it really so hard to figure out which community you belong to, and thus, where your question belongs? Ask yourself this: what is your job title? which community ...

They are not subcommunities. They are partially intersecting communities. Many of the questions on Database administrators are firmly on the database side, involving no administration at the system level. Most questions on Webmasters involve the page contents, not the administration of the servers. Many of the questions on IT Security are not about system ...

Simple answer; revenue sharing. Right now people volunteer their time while those who own the site are rolling in cash. Revenue share on a per ad impression/click-through so that the person who asked the question, and the person who's answer was accepted will receive a fraction of the revenue generated in perpetuity.

I believe the new reasons were inspired by the top 3 proposals from New close reasons - Proposals (July 2013), with the first two amalgamated.

Can someone either explain how this is a good idea? Joel Spolsky did this blog post which I would roughly sum up as "because people are pettifogging separatists and you can't change them". Of course there are legitimate reasons for forking - especially if you consider that a site's reputation is not just a number. But I agree with you that the current ...

Well, basically these sites come to be because of Area 51. This is where new Stack Exchange sites are proposed, and they get more people committing to them, until eventually it reaches enough to have a beta, then a full site. You can see a full list of those that have been launched. Is this a good idea? I do not think so. This is just my opinion. I feel the ...

OK, moderators have officially been mailed the form to obtain the cards. Stay tuned!