Why does the whole site have to remain vibrant? As long as there is new relevant content the old stuff doesn't matter. Some obscure questions will have the least activity but can be really helpful if there is no other resources answering them.

You shouldn't be hunting for questions and actively trying to get them deleted. The criteria are there so that bad questions are removed naturally. By gaming the system you are breaking how it was intended to work.

Why would it keep coming up if it didn't exist?

@RobM I am complaining about the people who are closing questions too soon for the wrong reasons, don't be so quick to assume that my comments are aimed at you personally.

and yet that is the type of perfectly reasonable question which is getting closed or migrated to SU often. I'm not saying that there should not be a bar of quality, I'm saying that certain people who have a snobbish attitude have more influence over where that is set than the general community. The cliquey snobbish impression that we are currently giving new people is one of the reasons that is putting people off. Incidently, I would question whether some of the top users actually even are professional sysadmins because they seem to have far too much free time to be on here! :)

The quality bar should be set through ratings by a number of users though, not by the first 5 elitist snobs who read the question and think that it is beneath them. People keep saying that serverfault isn't for everyone, well the same logic applies to questions. Just because a question is boring or too easy for you doesn't mean someone else can't use it as an intro to answering.

While they are obviously crucial to the process, the site isn't here for the benefit of the people answering questions. It is a knowledgebase to help solve people's problems, if they are not getting an answer then it has failed them and they won't go on to add further contributions.

The problem is when as in this question it is regarding an area of technology where the expertise for a useful answer is here and getting thrown out to SU will mean likely a low quality answer or none at all.

@Iain your first comment here is completely false. Is google unsuccesful because it contains junk pages? no. They are not a problem because they go to the bottom of results. A river of crappy questions provides little value, but likewise it is not detrimental. They can be ignored by answerers, they can go to the bottom of lists, etc. Sometimes one will be redeemed but most of the time they will just teach people how to write better questions.

@Iain Which is important though, who asked the question or who the question helps? As a systems administrator a lot of the answers I come here for have been asked by someone, I don't care who asked as long as I find a relevant answer. But also I regularly find questions I need to find an answer to have been closed or migrated to SU for some daft reason because someone asked them slightly the wrong way which is really frustrating.

It is not very forward thinking either. Most of us professionals were at one time enthusiastic amateurs in our home/garage/basement, etc. By making those people unwelcome now we are reducing the likelyhood of them joining later. The line needs to be drawn closer to not providing tech support.

This is easy enough for you and me, but newcomers don't know these ways to make it work for them and to be honest they should not have to. The whole reason to have human moderators and not just an automated filter is so that they can use a bit of common sense and discretion.

well you are not wrong in that aim, but it seems to go too far at times

It seems to me that mods have lost sight of their purpose on this. Rather than thinking 'we must destroy any home related question at all costs' you should be thinking 'could this be useful to an admin, maybe? ah what the hell if a few home questions slip through'

and you wonder why people are put off serverfault when they face this attitude from so called community leaders

@Chopper3 being pedantic about incidental details in order to ignore the point or to flag a question that would otherwise apply in a professional environment is neither precise or helpful.

@RobM indeed, too much pedantry does seem to be part of the problem