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One important point that a lot of us seem to be completely missing is: Sysadmins do NOT always have the luxury of choosing the hardware/software! It certainly is nice to be able to choose the best gear for the job at hand. But that is not always possible. My situation is that our company is supporting on a professional basis, many small business clients ...

I disagree with this, because this is way too broad, and it's unhelpful, and it will encourage people to hit people on the head with this question instead of, you know, helping them. There is a time and a place when advising someone to get professional help is appropriate, but it should not be the first answer. Otherwise, this answer could basically apply ...

No, it needs more work. This text has some flaws that still need to be worked out. We need more revisions. If you have specific problems, add them as a comment. Though, for extended debate on specific points, another meta-question or chat-transcript is probably a better choice.

Removing the requirement to be a professional means telling these users “your question isn’t appropriate as it stands, improve it by...” instead of telling them “you don’t belong here because you aren’t what I consider to be a professional sysadmin. But as I understand it, the requirement has never been to be a professional; the requirement has always ...

Strike "No exceptions." from the "Anything in a home setting" line Anything in a home setting. No exceptions. While I'm all for the sentiment the reality is that we DO deal with things in a home setting in the course of every-day corporate support -- See for example this meta question asking if it's OK to ask about VPNing in to the office from a ...

What about development? That is currently excluded together with the home environment, but that exclusions is omitted in your draft. Setting up development environments is explicitly on-topic in Stack Overflow and has been off-topic on ServerFault. But... There is the DevOps trend that works well for start-ups and more and more enterprises think that is ...

This is not a good idea. We have enough of a problem with being snippy around here without being able to rattle off a 'U NOOB! HIRE A SYSADMIN!' with a link to a canonical answer saying so. That is REALLY going to put people off the site.

I'm not opposed to changing the help center text (I'm the idiot who suggested doing it last time, and frankly I still don't think it's very good), but I have some issues with your proposal as it stands. Professional Capacity We have pretty clearly defined what we mean by "in a professional capacity". It's meant to exclude bad questions from developers who ...

I'm very skeptical of this change. "Managing informaton technology systems" could include a newbie volunteer who is trying to set up a mailing list for a student club on Go Daddy hosting. The question could be as "We're looking for feature X, which seems to be missing. How can we work around it without paying for a more expensive service?" Not very ...

As I already stated in a comment: I actually thought the FAQ covered this pretty well. Questions pertaining to "domestic/consumer grade" devices are not automatically off topic. Quite the contrary. The very vast majority of businesses use such devices. It's only the medium and upward businesses that can justify the expense of "enterprise grade". It's not ...

Yes, this is good enough. It's good as is, no revision-round needed. Approved.

I have to admit that I am really really glad to see answers trending towards permissive on this question. Frankly I am starting to get worried about a mindset that seems to want to find as many ways as possible to rule a question off topic. And then "burninate" or "baninate" or kill it with some insane amount of overkill. We're starting to sound a lot like ...

This bit is too broad: working with services hosting or enabling your information technology We still aren't wanting to accept such things as end-user shared-web-hosting questions. But excluding these in the list of topics is tricky. I think this is a bit better: deployment to and management of third-party provided information technology ...

I've sent a message off to the Developers, since changing the faq requires (as I understand it) a site version iteration since it's part of the static files of serverfault.com. We're waiting on word right now.

I don't think it's a good idea...and I honestly don't see it come up that often. Who actually posts questions on this site? It's not "non-IT" folks from other departments/professions posting questions, 99% of the time I'd venture it is someone in IT or at least been given the responsibility of administering whatever they are asking about (otherwise it's ...

Add the following (or something similar) to the part about our sister sites: We have sister sites: ... All these sites are part of the StackExchange network, which covers a broad range of topics. Reason: I believe most new users don't understand that SF is part of a whole network of sites, and with this line we make the reference explicit, not just an ...

There is some inconsistency in the wording that kind of bugs me. In the following... Servers hardware Operating Systems, including linux windows-server-2008 freebsd solaris Server Software, such as apache2 exchange-2010 sharepoint Virtualization, including vmware-esxi hyper-v kvm ... we go from using "including" to "such as" and back to "including". The ...

Add best-practices for addressing organizational and technical challenges to the Operations, Maintenance, and Monitoring: section

I'd say we should go with the context of the question: Questions about consumer grade equipment used in a professional setting are fine, although they can be migrated to SU if they're very likely to get better answers there. Questions that happen to be about a home setup but are clearly applicable to a business environment are fine. I think that in order ...