25
I have to admit, cries of "Read the FAQ!" are a hallmark of USENET. I used to rail at length at newbs who clearly did not do their due-diligence in newsgroups of yore, and even daily postings of it didn't do any good since all they saw was a group named something interesting, saw a few posts that seemed like that there were smart people around, and posted ...
23
I've hammered a lot of questions, so you may be surprised to hear me say that moderators should use the mod hammer sparingly. I've also not hammered many more questions that I thought should be closed, that were I not a moderator I would have VTC'd without a second thought. This may be because I read a lot more of Server Fault than most people, and happen to ...
20
I wouldn't take it personally. I have it on good authority that the guy's just a prick.
But, he's a prick who's going through a massive tag cleanup effort at the moment, so he probably bumped into a group of your old questions because of their tags.
I'd venture a guess that upon reviewing those questions with the site's current topicality rules in mind, ...
19
In the past, it was dead easy:
Flag for moderator attention
The Moderator will check to see if the two really are likely belonging to the same person.
If it looks like it, the moderator will merge the users.
Only, that doesn't work anymore. A few weeks ago the Stack Exchange staff took away user-merge as a moderator power. Mistakes were made, and they ...
18
I'm sorry, but that question is not a perfectly fine question for this site.
Serverfault is for questions applicable to professional sysadmins. As soon as you run into "sorry, I can't do this the right way because I don't have admin rights on the server", then the question is one for an end-user. That means the question is not appropriate for this site.
...
17
Also a quote from the election page:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/
The ideal moderator does as little as possible. But those little actions may be powerful and highly concentrated. Judiciously limiting your use of moderator powers to selectively prune and guide the community — now that’s the true art of moderation.
15
One very important requirement for questions on ServerFault: You need to be administrator on the system in question, in order to be able to fully follow possible answers. That rules you out, at least in the context of this question.
The question might fit on other sites in the SE network.
14
I haven't found an official source/reference for this yet, but here's my opinion:
Mods should not radically change the content of a comment. Spelling mistakes, various typos, and the like are fair game for correction. If part of a comment is "hostile" and the rest is not, delete only the offending part.
With that blanket statement, I'll confess that I've ...
14
It is Ok for you to delete something that is not an answer, if you really think it did not help to solve the in the first place you should delete it, although without my first post, I wouldn't be able to get as much info as I needed to help the user, which I'm certain that I could. Isn't this the purpose of this website?
Answer must actually and completely ...
14
"Do not do it again" is an order (an imperative statement), not a threat. A threat would be "If you do it again, I'll come to your house with a cream pie and throw it into your face while shouting, 'Mit Schlag!'" Or some other statement that included potential consequences. Moderators are allowed to make imperative statements.
As for whether or not it'...
13
I will only speak for myself. I was a very (and by very I mean very very) active member of Serverfault before I became moderator. I literally answered hundreds of questions in the first months.
At the time Jeff asked me if I wanted to become a moderator, I accepted and I somehow felt relieved, because I could help improving the site without writing answers ...
13
The other have addressed your concerns regarding the content of your question.
In regard to reporting personal issues with a moderator there is a contact button at the bottom of every page. It links to a form which allows you to contact the Community Team.
13
As a candidate, I think I should clarify my position on this.
Mod-hammering is sometimes appropriate. I'd even go so far as to say that it is often appropriate. There are a lot of very clear and distinct cases about which there can be no controversy. As an elected moderator, I would facilitate the swift disposition of those questions.
Why?
The ...
13
You flag it or post in meta.
It's not locked, to allow answers, but I put a comment warning about the edit war on it. Flag, or notify me (@HopelessN00b) if there are any more problems.
13
I don't see any outright insults here on the part of naktinis, at least as far as I would be insulted, but your comment was also completely unnecessary and outright wrong in the situation.
To recapitulate: The question was in a nutshell "how are these commands named, I forgot". The complete answer to this is nginx_ensite and nginx_dissite. The link Michael ...
11
I don't want to speak for Chopper as I'm sure he'll weigh in, but he does seem to indicate that they are overwhelmed with flags from time to time.
I just went over our mod list, and I notice that many of our mods are only doing flagwork or commenting on things that might have been flagged - not answering questions. One mod (Karfa) is very inactive.
They ...
11
I was the one that declined that flag. Yeah, the user did not read the FAQ, but that doesn't inherently make the question off-topic.
We've got a long standing reasoning here that just because something is at home does not automatically mean it's off topic (if I have time later I will find the relevant posts). Take for example:
I have CentOS 6 server at ...
11
As usual, I'm gonna define a "bad" post as one that has been closed, deleted (by someone other than the author), or down-voted below zero. In the past 60 days,
Questions
Registered Unregistered Registered Badness Unreg Badness PctRegBad PctUnregBad
---------- ------------ ------------------ ------------- --------- -----------
6853 448 ...
11
I read over the question...and you added the bit about not being able to upgrade Fedora 14 after the comments were made.
On ServerFault, we expect askers to have some measure of professional experience with the servers/equipment they work on. Fedora 14 is wayyyy out of date and no-one should really be using this. "I can't upgrade this" doesn't really fly ...
11
Instead of beeing harsh,
(much as I joke, I do agree with the others. This is not a place to have a conversation, stick with the answering. If you don't have enough rep to comment, get some).
11
Nice that you have an opinion and everything, but you're wrong.
Also, for what it's worth, I flagged that post, and if it miraculously gets undeleted, I'll throw a delete vote on it, as will at least two other users with >=20,000 reputation, so it'll be deleted anyway.
This is a Q&A site, not a forum. Questions are supposed to be posted as questions, ...
11
Do you really think that Is RHCA good? is a good question that will actually have value for people. The problem I see with most career questions is that ~95% of them are crap like the one you mentioned. Your answer is fine, but the question was junk.. Most career questions poorly written, and frequently highly specific to the single person. They almost ...
10
I can't talk about other mods but...
Sometimes I have lots of time to work of SF, other times due to work/family/friends/kitten-slaughter I don't and that's when I'm either not around or short with those that test my patience.
I know I can be horrible sometimes, it's always towards whoever I consider the idiot-du-jour (there's always one) and never to ...
10
Your first answer isn't an answer and should have been a comment as all you were doing is ask for additional information rather than answering the question - this is the definition of a comment. I almost flagged your first answer myself earlier but I got distracted and forgot.
Your second answer doesn't actually answer the question either. We generally ...
9
I'm a bit borderline on this one. I'm more than fed up with new users ignoring the prompts to read the FAQ, which are pretty damn prominent, and then proceeding to post crap that violates said FAQ. I can't image how many times I've posted comments suggesting, at various strengths, that they do read the FAQ.
OTOH, rudeness of any sort has always been frowned ...
9
Crossposting is generally frowned upon. ServerFault, or any other site in the StackExchange network, really don't care about your deadlines. Adding a bounty is the best way to get more attention.
9
If you feel that your question is on the wrong SE site, you can flag and request that a moderator move it to another SE site. This is preferable to cross posting.
Having said that it would appear that your question is on the correct site. Adding a bounty (as you have) will hopefully garner more interest.
As to your deadlines, they're not ours. We don't ...
9
There are two issues here.
The problem is highly unlikely to be linked to your hypothesized problem.
You're failing to connect the dots between what we've been telling you and the probabilities surrounding your potential faults.
Yes, it is odd that the VPS provider is reporting "used" RAM that isn't 'used' according to the OS. The VPS provider has a ...
9
I do realise that moderation styles differ between sites, but I tend to consider closing clearly off topic questions to be a moderator task of sorts (though it still feels odd for me to do it).
A good mod is a janitor. However, sometimes...
Slightly firmer action is required. I'd consider breaking out the hoe and getting rid of crap to be a transitional ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
