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Fewer contributors and less to really contribute to. I'd know... I've probably given the greatest number of answers over the years, and on a day-to-day basis, it's far tougher for me to find any questions worth expending my effort.
Again, the optics matter. This looks incredibly sloppy on the part of SE, and you've lost a lot of goodwill. I'd be interested in a real explanation about why Stack Exchange so easily alienates the Server Fault community.
Sometimes the professional thing to do is to reformat and reinstall. If there are external factors; deadlines, budget concerns, availability issues... A good engineer knows when to cut their losses and stop the troubleshooting process. The customer often times doesn't care how you arrive at a solution, but rather that it is delivered on-time and on-budget.
+1 - People aren't following the traditional sysadmin path. It's not a full-time role in many organizations. It should be, as there's a world of best-practices that come with experience in the field. I think in your case, you should try to form good questions. I have no problem helping someone who may not know how it "should be done". I do have a problem when the effort placed in describing the issue is too low or if it's difficult to obtain the pertinent information from the question asker. Also, going through that effort, I expect a followup: "It works", "thank you" or accept the answer!
My other problem with this "new class" of users is that they usually don't return, provide feedback to (my) followup question or even bother accepting answers. A quick query on data.stackexchange.com shows that I've answered 1,168 questions where the OP didn't even select an answer. Many of these were abandoned. They're treating this site like Yahoo Answers.
Yes, the devops/code-focused thing is happening... but it's not happening everywhere. Not everything is about hyper-automated web-scale systems. And that's not really the way the bulk of the industry (from my vantage point) is going. When I see questions that focus solely on that type of architecture, I wonder, "where are your mentors? Who is really responsible for the systems? And how did you get placed in charge of them?" It's like sysadmins have been erased from that landscape and the path of mentorship and learning basics is just over.
True.. I have another larger bounty that I've been waiting on... And neither have been marked, so maybe I'm just wondering if people stopped caring. Or if there's some confusion about how it all works. (or if I'm a sucker!)
