116
It was closed as a dupe. Delete the hoax and keep the dupe. Consider merging the answers from the hoax into it. Remember SF is for practical problems you are trying to solve. A hoax by definition isn't this.
112
Consider Nuking the OP's account too. Anything less will just encourage other marketing stunts like this.
73
The biggest problem I see here is that Stack Exchange is showing that they do not trust democratically elected moderators to do what they were elected to do. We, as a community, elected HopelessN00b to be one of our leaders because we knew he would be willing to do the one thing that he got spanked for... cleaning up junk questions that didn't belong on this ...
66
I'll be the first to admit that I've stepped away from SF for a while. Those reasons are my own, and everyone should be able to step away when they want to.
That said, I've been looking at the site more recently, partly because it's been brought up in team meetings and partly because I miss answering questions and helping people.
This is not the ...
60
Everyone has a different definition of what is "blindingly obvious". We all have huge gaps in our knowledge. The smarter you get, the more you realize how much you don't know.
There are plenty of questions I've asked that were obvious to someone more experienced with
the particular software/hardware/whatever than I was.
And there are plenty of ...
55
Undelete the question and edit it to explain the situation.
53
Provide as much information as necessary to answer the question. You may obfuscate anything that may be sensitive, but be careful of obfuscating too much. These may occasionally come into conflict...
Server Fault does not require you to obfuscate anything. These guidelines are intended to keep you out of trouble and to help you get better answers to your ...
50
(this started as a comment on Ryan's post, but it got too long, so now it's an answer)
The way SE staff handled this situation was an absolute nightmare. If one is going to be a Community Manager, they had better have intimate knowledge of the community they're managing. Lacking this, clear, open, and honest conversations with the active community members ...
48
Since HopelessN00b wants to have this discussion in public, I will oblige.
I was on the site today because we got a few different emails this past week about it. One was Chris S, stepping down as a moderator - I'll let him talk about that if he wishes to; moderators are volunteers, and are of course free to step down at any time. The rest were complaints ...
47
No, each question should be judged on its own merits.
Although we all agree that life-cycle management is important, its is also difficult.
Good questions about legacy products are welcome.
41
Undelete the question, mark it as a dupe, add a note, and lock it.
It has a significant number of inbound links, and a lot of traffic right now. Deleting it leaves these links broken, "Page Not Found" to the vast majority of viewers.
Marking it as a duplicate directs users to the more pertinent real question, while not denying people the opportunity to ...
40
Absolutely not! It would have had greater effect if it read:
Your boss hasn't given you any substantive reason, in saying this. You should definitely ask for more details (we can't possibly give an answer with just this), and if it is a consistent and serious problem it might be better for you professionally to seek employment elsewhere. You could also ...
40
So since this is a discussion question I'd like to discuss something tangentially related to the change in mods, which is a philosophy on mass-closures.
For my part I've got no problem with closing crap questions. I've even been a participant in some of our community-led mass purges, because some questions are in fact just crap and have no place on this ...
37
I guess this'll teach me to ignore meta for a few days. ;)
This bothers me primarily because HopelessN00b is loud and brash and confrontational, and ran on a platform of, to put it n00b-ily, "slamming crap closed." He was duly elected, despite many SE employees (including you, Shog9) saying you thought it was a terrible idea because he's loud and brash ...
37
If the questions are of a low quality, they should be downvoted and/or closed. You haven't linked to any of the questions you consider remedial, but I'm assuming that you mean ones that show little or no research effort and that are very basic. The very basic ones can be closed as off-topic with the following close reason:
Questions on Server Fault must ...
36
It's entirely up to you what you want to do with your answer. You provided it in good faith based on the information in the question at the time you wrote it.
Remember - we're here not just for the OP but for everyone else who my be experiencing similar problems. Your answer will be useful to some people.
There is no honour where rep is concerned.
36
Having just spent several minutes weed-whacking a bunch of similar posts from hopeful marketers trying to provide tool suggestions to people having problems, I can say that such tool-only posts are an invitation sign to a lot more. Every morning I have to deal with one to three such posts.
Since you have the rep to see it, take a look at the deleted history ...
36
Thanks a lot for your times to write that to explain the situation. It’s really appreciated.
I will state it to let other know that I don’t intend to quit my moderation tasks.
nb; to state my position on the issue:
If some of you are following what unfolded with the new CoC, please know that I was a witness in the start of the event, and in a indirect ...
35
The aim of the site is to be a replacement for search engines, so good answers are where you find them: there's nothing wrong with an answer that's based on a bit of googling, as long as it does answer the question and it isn't a straight steal of someone else's work (we've seen answers that appear to be someone just cutting and pasting vague results of a ...
35
I am fine with this, as long as:
The systems and equipment are truly professional-grade. (No questions about Aunt Mabel's inkjet printer)
You have full administrative permissions on the systems you are asking about, and have the authority to modify their configuration.
You have attempted to resolve the situation on your own, and can provide evidence to us ...
34
It's very useful to know that a particular version of software/drivers/firmware actually fixes the problem that someone is describing, so these answers can be incredibly helpful to other people facing the same problem (especially people for whom upgrading firmware may be a practical problem, e.g. in production systems, high availability systems, or just ...
34
There's a few things at work here:
You're right that some people avoid answering questions from low-rep users because there's a good chance that the asker won't give any sort of feedback. Personally, I long ago let go of my craving for UIP ("Useless Internet Points") and I've been happier ever since, but I know it's a concern that some people have.
Plenty ...
34
Answer yourself. It provides useful information to other people (including Future You -- I've found my own answers to SF questions via searches more than once).
32
From the comments here and the answers and comments on Michael Hampton's post about Admin panel questions, it seems pretty clear to me that:
we have broad agreement that those sorts of questions are usually off-topic
the vast majority of the questions Noob closed (possibly all, but I don't think multiple people are going to go through the whole list and ...
answered Apr 10 '15 at 17:48
32
Unfortunately Server Fault is unable to support web hosting control panels for a variety of reasons. But you may still be able to get help at:
Your Service Provider
If you are using a web hosting resource (e.g. shared hosting or VPS) provided by someone else and need help with the control panels to manage it, first contact your service provider. If the ...
32
I would say yes. Systems administrators can also use vagrant for testing our own environments. Say you want to test your puppet manifests against a known standard configuration - you could vagrant up an entire testing system environment.
Additionally, part of a systems administrators job is supporting the systems that the staff use. Vagrant still falls ...
30
@MichaelHampton's post was rendered obsolete today. The new method of reporting purloined content is:
Send all reports of SCRAPERs to team@stackoverflow.com. Please include:
the URL of the copied post
the URL of the original post on SE
for high-rankers, the search string you used (and the name of the search engine, if not Google)
any other ...
answered Oct 10 '13 at 3:38
30
There is nothing wrong with a nice generic answer. They are frequently better than nothing. If this is the type of answer you prefer to give, feel free to continue doing that.
On the other hand, if we assume in good faith that the person has already researched the question, then they might have already read the docs you have mentioned, and they are not ...
30
There appear to be good reasons to downvote and/or close this question, but the fact that the person asking is the same person answering is not one of them. Judge both questions and answers on their merits, without regard to the identity of their authors.
30
First of all: there is no requirement to associate your SE profile with your real life identity, it is a personal preference to do so or not.
The reasons to do that are also personal and diverse.
Some people thrive in anonymity (you don't even have to create an account to participate on SE) as their questions, opinions and recommendations should speak ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible