Thanks to everyone, (but Mark in particular). This whole discussion/"thread" was really helpful to me. Or will be once I get my head around markdown. It really *does* choke orphans, rape neurons and everything else.

@MarkHenderson actually, you know what I did read? The parts with backtick higlighting and <kbd> tags. Right, which I'm now going to claim was part of my plan to make exactly that point all along. ;)

how do I request it be nuked from orbit? By asking the question here, it seems.

@MarkHenderson Good to know. Maybe I'll just paste my most recent posts in as reports I have to get done for work, confident in the certainty no one will bother reading past an opening paragraph or two.

+1 for not wanting to be too restrictive on what's "professional" in someone's unknown production environment. As awful an idea as it is, when project or task constraints are "whatever equipment you can beg borrow or steal, $0, and completed by yesterday," the proper professional behavior can be shoving a MAMP stack into production, as dirty as I feel saying so. And in shops with shoestring budgets for hardware and software, I've had great results shoving a LAMP stack onto an old desktop and reminding the boss/client it's an awful idea that will hurt later, but you insisted, so, there it is.

@Nils yeah, probably not an ideal solution. Shuffling more questions to other sites won't help with all the lousy questions that already exist anyway. You can always do a bunch of different tag searches and sort them by newest to get a reasonable filter of the new questions in your favorite tags. May as well use browser tabs for this kind of thing, since they already exist.

@gWaldo I should have phrased that better... I meant from the user base. I expected all the morons asking questions to be management, and all the lazy people to be asking questions to be... well, me. Admittedly, that hasn't worked out very well, but still, show of hands - how many SAs got into this to answer dumb and/or lazy questions from the internet...?

There's already a script that cleans up low view, unanswered questions. I'd be hesitant about closing questions with no upvoted answers, because that doesn't mean there's no valuable information in them. Hit-and-run users are far less likely to upvote an answer (incapable), and a perfectly brilliant, highly useful answer to a question with few views could well get no upvotes.

@JohnGardeniers Indeed. All things in moderation. Not to mention that the best part of awful questions is reading the snarky/funny comments anyhow; it's the only way some of these questions have any value whatsoever.

there has been a massive upswing in people using Server Fault as "Tech Support for the Intertubes" lately Also, I moved into Systems Administration to get away from having to answer obvious questions from morons (or people to lazy to read the damn documentation) and not to field those questions from the global community.

Is the default view 15 answers per page? That would definitely seem to suggest smaller batches might be a better approach.

@Zoredache that's my default view too, when I'm not in what-new-garbage-needs-to-be-attended-to-today mode, so I can't say it bothers me either, but as it turns out, I am not the whole world (as incredibly unjust as that is). :)