@JimB If you want to contribute a better close reason, I encourage you to do so. Having said that, we recently spent months rewriting the "unprofessional" close reason to its current state about ~"reasonable IT management practices," and IMO, have a worse, more confusing reason as a result. And why did we rewrite it? Because people who were not sysadmins under any definition of the term complained about the previous "unprofessional" close reason. We've been doing this dance (oh, it's the content, not the person, even if it really is the person) for years, and we need to stop.

@JimB And to add on to Hyppy's point, this is unfair to the venom-spewing new user as well. They are understandably pissed off that they were told they need to improve their question, which they did, only to find out that they wasted their time and effort, because that wasn't really the problem. The problem was that they don't know enough to participate in the community to begin with, and Server Fault was just wasting their time and stringing them along by implying or saying that their question might be reopened if they invested some effort..

@JimB You're welcome to dig up whatever you can find to support your position, but I'm currently in contact with a large number of the site's former respected users, and can tell you that the reasons they give for walking away or no longer contributing is that the site is a dumping ground for unprofessional questions from unprofessional users. I also took a ~one year hiatus from the site myself, so I speak from personal experience too. That cleaning up old, off-topic content has caused so much drama is extremely disheartening, and speaks to the viability of SF as a professional community.

@JimB The reason that close reason is no longer used is because it caused a lot of confusion and complaints from posters. ~"How is this off topic???? It's about my server, which has a fault... FUCK YOU JERKS!!!!" Sometimes the answer is "sorry, but we can't help you," as we've been over many times on meta, and surrounding the "minimal understanding" close reason. You may find it disturbing, but it's the honest truth. Dealing with problem users (people) is also called out as one of the primary moderator responsibilities, since normal users can get privs to deal with problem content.

...and this is exactly what's been driving away the expert users for years. You can't swing a dead cat around here without finding a 10k+ user who has completely walked away from the site, or no longer contributes on a regular basis, and the reason stated for the departure is always related to crappy questions from people who "don't belong here." In fact, that's even the reason the Comms Room is now abandoned for all intents and purposes. A bunch of the community's high rep and respected users decided to pack it, and moved to a non Stack Exchange chat platform, for exactly this reason.

@Jaydles The comment that was placed on these posts actively emphasized that the user isn't welcome directly As does this community in general, our topicality page (and other help pages), other canned close reasons and the linked discussions on why admin panels are off topic. Server Fault is for professional systems administrators. We don't want questions about your personal [whatever], or from users, and we state this clearly all over the place. That wording you object to is a combination of another moderator's statements on control panels and one of our (old) close reasons.

@JimB lxadmin/kloxo is an admin panel, and if you look at that user's other questions, he is quite clearly asking another question about his system which has kloxo on it. It also a very basic question that fails the "professional" test, is a duplicate of ... well, "how do I use grep", and has attracted a large number of crappy answers. So if you don't like the admin panel closure reason, that's fine. There are multiple reasons for that question to be closed, and since there's no way to pick more than one close reason, I picked the most direct, unambiguous one. webpanel, off-topic, period.

I suppose it's too late now, and perhaps this was the point, but I'd been using that tag as a group of questions that needed review and action, and at least one normal user had been using it to mine flags (VTC), since it was primarily admin panel questions, with a significant minority of other atrocious, unsalvagable tags. Oh well.

@shog9 While I would not be opposed to grepping for the names of administration panels and closing every result programmatically, I actually read every question I closed, and selected what I believe to be the most specific, unambiguous reason, which was usually that custom one. This does not mean, or imply it's the only reason, as for example, with this question. I closed it yesterday with the administration panel reason (cPanel), but it is also off topic for at least 3 other reasons, and has already collected 2 close votes as of the time of this comment.

Actually, if you search the body of those questions, you will find an admin panel in every one of them. Though often not explicitly stated in the question, a path which betrays the existence of the administration panel can be found in the posted configs or console messages.

@Shog9 Yup, go for it. As to your answer, that will be along a little later, once I figure out what I wish to do in response to this blindsiding... And I cool off some. Also, what, specifically, you'd like explained would probably be useful to me - I don't see how closing explicitly off-topic questions requires an explanation, so your request for an explanation confuses me a little.

@shog9 go ahead and say whatever you wish to about it and/or me. I'm honestly a bit curious myself, given that the on topic page explicitly calls out administration panels as off topic.

The are explicitly off topic according to the on topic page. That someone did something to provoke this discussion again ... well, says a lot about the state of this community.

I don't want "many" users, I only want users capable of contributing useful content. People who can't do that but want to benefit from my technical expertise anyway can pay me for the privilege.

@peterh a newbie who skips through all that information, asks a useless question without enough information to answer, and then proceeds to call you a "complete and utter cunt" for not answering his question doesn't deserve help, he deserves to be set on fire. In the more broadly applicable case, if they don't read all the help they already get before asking their question, they don't deserve any consideration after - they're being inconsiderate jerks, wasting everybody's time with their garbage.

That SU question about the toaster is real, and completely legitimate, FYI. Developers...

DevOps FTW... erm, I mean, All hail our new insect overlords!

I didn't lock it permanently because that prevents voting, and I think the answer should have more upvotes... but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen, and since the spammers keep targeting this answer for some reason, I suppose the permanent lock is the better course of action.